There Is No Antimemetics Division

Qntm, the pen name of software developer Sam Hughes, makes his traditionally published debut (after the serialized online novel Ra) with this acrobatically absurdist tale of a team of special agents tasked with saving humanity from a menagerie of “Unknowns.” These “memetic threats” come in many forms: from monsters and supernatural objects to “contagious ideas, which require containment just like any physical threat.” What makes these Unknowns especially troublesome is that anyone who comes in contact with them loses their memories. Antimemetics Division director Marie Quinn is so desperate to learn more about the Unknowns that she doses her predecessor, Division founder Andrew Hilton, with a lethal memory-recovering drug. She discovers that the first Antimemetics unit was created within the British Army during WWII to combat “the idea of Nazism.” When one of the Unknowns attaches itself to Quinn, she suspects the only way to get free of the memetic threats forever may involve destroying humanity. Meanwhile, her husband, a violinist with a genetic mutation that has spared his memory, tries to save her, but she no longer remembers him. The zany narrative is further complicated by some formalist flourishes, including pages blackened by a censor’s pen and letters missing from words throughout. Hard sci-fi fans looking for riddles and spectacle will be entertained, if occasionally baffled. (Nov.)