There Is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Humanity is under assault by malevolent “antimemes”—ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself—in this whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel.

“Utterly brilliant . . . a dazzling, confusing novel with a highly effective, creeping sense of dread . . . I can’t recommend it enough.”—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post

“[An] unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel.”—The Guardian

They’re all around us, hiding in plain sight.

One could be in the room with you now, just to your left. You could be seeing it right now—but from this second to the next, you’ll forget that you did. If you managed to jot down a note, the paper would look blank to you afterward.

These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you—and you’ll never even know anything changed.

They can turn you into a living ghost—make it so you’re standing next to your spouse, screaming in their ear, and they won’t know you’re there.

They’re predators equipped with the ultimate camouflage, living black holes for information, able to consume our very memories of their existence.

And they aren’t just feeding on us. They’re invading.

But how do you fight an enemy when you can never even know that you’re at war? How do you contain something you can’t record or remember?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

qntm is the internet handle of Sam Hughes, a writer and software developer living in the UK. He has been writing short-form and serial science fiction for most of this millennium; his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond.

“[An] unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel . . . There have been stories before about mysterious alien entities existing, hidden, within our world, and secret government departments tasked with protecting humanity. This debut pushes the idea to the most terrifying extreme.”—The Guardian

“Astonishing. Pitch-perfect cosmic horror—and the pitch will break all the glass in your brain.”—M. R. Carey, #1 international bestselling author of The Girl with All the Gifts

“[A] superlative performance . . . in a class with anything by HPL, or Ligotti, or Clark Ashton Smith, or the more surreal stories by Ballard . . . QNTM has succeeded in infusing his tale with the identity confusion and paranoia of PKD’s A Scanner Darkly; with the esoteric paradigm-shattering illogic of Max Barry’s Lexicon; and with the transgalactic horrors of Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites.”—Locus

“Utterly brilliant . . . [The] synopsis barely scratches the surfaces of the baroque weirdness of There Is No Antimemetics Division, a dazzling, confusing novel with a highly effective, creeping sense of dread. In a year that featured multiple novels about shared memories, this is a story about the horror of forgetting. . . . I can’t recommend it enough.”—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post

“A stone-cold cosmic horror classic about a department trying to combat anomalous beings whose very nature makes them impossible to see or remember encountering . . . an incredible read.”—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo Award–winning author of Children of Time and Service Model

“There Is No Antimemetics Division is the coolest, smartest, mind-blowing-est novel to be published this year, and probably for many years to come. It is utterly unique, constantly surprising, genuinely unsettling, and a towering work of speculative fiction that may very well take its place among the best sci-fi novels of the century so far.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

“An addictive, dizzying experience that will make you feel like your brain has been pulled apart and reassembled by a mad scientist. . . . What would be considered a mind-bending twist in another novel happens on every other page of There Is No Antimemetics Division. I’ve never read anything like it, unless I did and just forgot.”—Jason Pargin, New York Times bestselling author of John Dies at the End

“Gripping, thrilling cosmic horror . . . Read it, and don’t forget it.”—Reactor

“A hugely entertaining, super smart, witty novel that is also nerve-shreddingly terrifying. While it’s packed with ideas, it puts human connection at its core, with an ending that is both tense and moving. It brought to mind The Lathe of Heaven and The Kraken Wakes—a timely book that is also one for the ages.”—Antonia Hodgson, author of The Raven Scholar, in Gizmodo

“No exaggeration, this is the most imaginative novel I have ever read. It’s compulsively readable and exquisitely mind-blowing from the first paragraph to the last. I enjoyed every word. . . . Highest possible recommendation.”—Scott Hawkins, author of The Library at Mount Char