On the extreme other end of the science-fiction spectrum from the popular and fast-paced Dungeon Crawler Carl books sits the novel There Is No Antimemetics Division by the writer qntm, lurking in the shadows of your memories. Waiting. The novel follows characters in a worldwide (though mostly British) Deep State division in a MI6/CIA organization—called the Organization—which deals with/captures/eliminates/chronicles mysterious entities (or objects, or ideas) which have as their defense mechanisms (and possibly their attack mechanisms) the ability to make us forget them. Which pushes this novel from science-fiction into horror.
As opposed to their sister division, the Memetics Division—which handles deadly meme-like ideas which, like deadly earworms, can’t be forgotten, the Antimemetics Division has to find, track and control anything involved with making humans forget things through inference, gaps and spaces. What these “things” are is never clear, even to the agents in the Antimemetics Division: sometimes they’re creatures or animals, sometimes they’re sentient beings, though from where these beings come from is unknown. Anything that comes under the jurisdiction of the Antimemetics Division is assigned the name “Unknown” with a numeric tag, shortened to, for example, U-7175 or U-9429. They’re also given Greek alphabet “danger” levels, from alpha to epsilon. As the head of the Antimemetics Division, Dr. Marie Quinn, puts it:
“Every competent memetics research project finds [these unknown things’] fingerprints sooner or later. It manifests all over the world, in many different forms. Many of the manifestations aren't even anomalous. Some of them, we already have catalogued separately in the main Unknown database. A very small number of them are even in containment. Impossibly virulent crazes, broken logic, invisible spiders as tall as skyscrapers, people born with extra limbs that nobody can see. That’s the raw data. Those manifestations are enough trouble to deal with in their own right...
But once you get a little farther down the road you start to see a pattern emerging in the data. You need to have the training in memetic science, but one you have that training and you have the data in front of you, it only takes a little extra effort to arrange those data points in conceptual space and draw a contour through them... those manifestations are the shadow it casts on our reality.”
Antimemetics Division personal also combat these Unknowns’ ability to make them forget by taking experimental pharmaceuticals which boost memory, but slowly destroy their bodies (and maybe their minds). This isn’t foolproof: Division personnel forget thing all the time. The battle against these Unknowns is a losing one. Quinn: “How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists?... How do you win without even realizing you’re at war?”
These “Unknowns” not only have the ability to make humans forget them, but to make texts about them forget. One of the problems for the Antimemetics Divisions is how to catalogue and describe their cases: electronic texts vanish faster, paper and pencil last longer. But there’s always the possibility of all evidence of Unknowns vanishing, as well as the entire Antimemetics Division forgotten by the rest of the world, before they’re all killed or after. Thus the title.
An example of qntm’s style I can’t duplicate in a word-processing document is how he’ll give example “case descriptions” of an Unknown subject, but the report will contain what we recognize as “redacted” words or sections. Sometimes the redactions are of names, but other times they’re of words easy to figure out, like “the” or “their” and the reader will realize that these are places where the text’s already vanishing, or forgetting. The idea of a black square of “redaction” versus simply leaving a blank space will become important later in the novel.
The style of There Is No Antimemetics Division is slow and spare—this isn’t a long novel. The chapters are like sketches—days in the life of the Antimemetics Division personnel, though they build to a story, and this spareness of style feeds into the theme of the book: Just as all texts involved in documenting these “Unknowns” gradually vanish, the novel itself is vanishing, that even a (supposed) fictional account of antimemetic creatures suffers the effects of their erasure. Not that the novel’s incomplete.
There Is No Antimemetics Division serves as kind of a parable for the fear (even horror) many, if not most, of us feel at how easily it seems other people forget the horrible things perpetuated by horrible people. Obvious examples: Covid, Epstein, Palestine (or even East Palestine, Ohio). And that this forgetting is forced on us, that we’re manipulated into forgetting. Ideology at its most horrific.