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Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division
- dinkleberg 7mo agoIt’s a fun book. Definitely worth a read.
- mathgenius 7mo agoAnd very creepy too. I loved it.
- frankfrank13 7mo agoI have not read this book. I've been avoiding it for a while for the dumbest possible reason, which is that I only associate this book with SWE's.
- nusl 7mo agoIt's worth a read, at least the first half, just because it's really fun.
- throw4847285 7mo agoExactly what a SWE would say.
- nusl 7mo agoI'm not a Single-Wombat Entity if that's what you're accusing me of. I do, in-fact, have multiple wombats making up my person.
- bluewin 7mo agoResearcher here, if you like antimemes as a concept then this is a nice treatment that introduces people to what it means and how one needs to think around them in order to function. It's a bit off kilter but well worth it
- HardwareLust 7mo agoGood timing, the Kindle version is $1.99 right now.
- mooxie 7mo agoI think the dynamic pricing algo is on to us - I see $13.99 at Amazon and clicked on a Google Play Books link for $1.99 that then became $13.99 magically, same for Apple Books.
- maximinus_thrax 7mo agoPlease don't 'buy' digital items from Amazon, because you won't actually own them. Pay extra, support your local bookshop and get a physical copy which you will actually own.
- lxgr 7mo agoI'd love to support the author more directly and "actually own" the ebook, but I have absolutely no interest in physical/printed books.
- hectdev 7mo agoThis disregards the benefit of a single device that is easy to carry. Love where this is come from so maybe do both if you can.
- caconym_ 7mo agoIt's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access. I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
- shimman 7mo agoI use a kindle but I have never bought a book on the kindle store ever (been using it for 10 years). Totally doable and not hard to avoid... especially since the smaller stores not only have better sales but the author typically gets more money too.
- SendItUp 7mo agoLoved this book. Definitely a mind trip
- Schmerika 7mo agoNice review; covers all the best points of the book, and its place in the world, without too many spoilers.
- AnotherGoodName 7mo agoI wonder if this is for the rewrite or the first version. I read the first version and thought the first half was good and that the second half felt clunky. To the point where i don’t recommend it to anyone (not a huge negative, there’s just better books out there).
- threethirtytwo 7mo agoI had the opposite reaction. The second half was garbage, but the first half was so good and original I'd recommend it just for that.
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoThe first few chapters of that book are some of the coolest I've ever read. I agree it really drops off in the second half, but would still recommend it to people.
- Insanity 7mo agoSame! I just finished the book a few days ago. The first half is really good, a cool premise and interesting story. The second half just got a bit too weird for me and by the final chapter I was happy it was finished lol.
- k__ 7mo agoI liked piecing the story together in the SCP wiki. Later I read the first version of the book and it was okay, but the vibes were a bit lost. The new version of the book I didn't even finish.
- yellottyellott 7mo ago> the first half was good and that the second half felt clunky > The second half was garbage, but the first half was so good so you had the same reaction?
- cwillu 7mo ago
- yakattak 7mo agoCrazy timing. My copy of this is being delivered today from the local bookshop. Great review.
- xnx 7mo ago24 days ago: Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363133
- troupo 7mo agoThere's also a short web series which is very good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3ywOKVBeAp1CmOhpsfueY2U5cLN84wN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3ywOKVBeAp1CmOhpsfu... I haven't seen the short film, so cannot compare.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoReally didn't like this adaptation.
- shmeeed 7mo agoHow about this one? https://youtu.be/w-IiVeGAydE?si=pXetv_531E_NJE_4 https://youtu.be/w-IiVeGAydE?si=pXetv_531E_NJE_4
- mynamemh 7mo ago[flagged]
- gostsamo 7mo agoTBH, the ending of Ra was a big letdown for me and though I like the small stories, I have the feeling that the author has issue building larger arcs. Still curious about this one and might read it just for the premise.
- k__ 7mo agoWriting good endings is hard. I liked Ra, but I liked Fine Structures more.
- jmgimeno 7mo agoCouldn't finish it. I suppose it was not for me.
- endgame 7mo ago[flagged]
- grimgrin 7mo agoYou can read the original here https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub There is also the rough draft. I've only read the wiki and the first draft of book Oddly I gifted the actual book away before reading it (I can buy it again, I thought)
- scrumbledober 7mo agoIt's surely not a great book and if you are someone who reads a book every few months i wouldn't recommend it. It's very weird and different and fun, though. I suggest it for people who read a lot of sci-fi and are looking for something that doesn't feel the same as 10 other books they've already read.
- tshaddox 7mo agoI'm smack dab in that "reads a book every few months" demographic, and also in that "people who work with formal systems for a living" demographic mentioned in this book review. I would absolutely recommend it for people in the vicinity of these two demographics. It's worth it for the originality. Both the plot and the storytelling format are very weird and very original.
- chis 7mo agoYeah my take is the exact opposite. It's such a page turner that the book has become one of my default recommendations for people looking to get back into reading. Of course you have to be a certain type of nerd to appreciate it.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cws 7mo agoThis article says “Book Review:” but then doesn’t provide the title of a book. I’m confused. :)
- rtaylorgarlock 7mo agoIt's in the title: "There is no Antimemetics Division" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870256-there-is-no-antimemetics-division https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870256-there-is-no-ant...
- davrosthedalek 7mo agoWhat title?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- andrewla 7mo agoWhy would you disagree with the parent post and then fail to provide the title of the book in your own response? Just give the name of the book, please.
- munificent 7mo agoI liked this one a lot. If you like weird fiction and enjoyed Jeff Vandermeer's Annhilation, there's a good chance you'll like this. If you don't like weird fiction, odds are you'll bounce off it.
- Grambo 7mo agoI loved the Southern Reach trilogy but didn't finish TINAD. I thought the premise was pushed too far and that less would've been more. OTOH the atmosphere of oppressive bureaucracy of Authority is still one my all time favorite scifi reads.
- jppope 7mo agoThe book was good but I struggled to finish it. You as a reader are encouraged to read because the ideas are so good but then it becomes hard to endure through to whatever resolution was waiting. For those unfamiliar, it will feel something like Momento - you start to feel yourself changing as you work through it. Worth a go for anyone looking for something different.
- rbanffy 7mo agoI know I must have read it, because I've found the book here with a page marker, but I don't remember much. I also can't find the book right now - it must be in my office somewhere.
- EliRivers 7mo agoThe core conceit lent itself so well to a (subverted) introductory "As you know" chapter that I didn't even notice it until I'd read it. Bravo for that alone. That said, from the review: "open source maintainership as cosmic horror." Genuine laugh.
- aaroninsf 7mo agoI read this. It's got some provocative ideas, which Stephen foregrounds. It's got a great hook, and like most writing incubated under circumstances like this, it leans hard into polished sharp introduction into a well-considered world with a very specific flavor. It's also—no better way to put it—crappy as a novel. It's not because the author can't string sentences together. It's because that's not what makes a novel function as a novel. Epic opening and premise establishment: 10/10 Nice "plot twist", predictable in its inevitability if not its specifics; conforms to genre: 7/10 Narrative arc: 2/10 Ability to sustain meaningful tension and interest while working through the de rigeur mechanics of filling hundreds of pages: 1/10 I get that there is a new readership with different expectations and styles of reading. (Looking at you tiktok; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl; looking at most successful YA fiction especially that which gets SPICEY and is released in 8-book series with a new volume every 11 months) If you're silverback and relish long-form fiction as previously conceived: set expectations accordingly.
- doug_durham 7mo agoI am a "silverback" and have read all of the classics of the SciFi genre and I loved this novel. An unconventional topic like this isn't going to fit all of the norms of writing. I thought it was well written and I love his dialog. I'm looking forward to future work.
- bluewin 7mo agoYeah, it's trying to cohere the structure of the book with the topic matter which I really appreciate. It doesn't always quite land, but I think it was really worthwhile. Although I can understand how someone who is looking for a "normal" novel might be dissatisfied. But to me it's a bit like house of leaves, you need to accept the meta-conceit of the book being subject to the effect of its contents.
- aaroninsf 7mo agoAs someone who has a low opinion of House of Leaves, and was e.g. entirely immune to the charms of Twin Peaks, I believe you're right. But even then... once this devolved into what felt like a teeth-clenching march to the Final Battle, on the basis AFAI can tell that this is what the author understood Novels Must Do, it wasn't even providing the pleasures you get from just floating along. It was just a grind. I can't take Adrian Tchaikovsky either...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mjburgess 7mo agoI dislike the ending, at least of v2. In it, the author basically gives a fleshed out (christian, neoplatonist) metaphysics to the world he's created which basically amounts to: heaven exists, humans win against the devil, etc. And the ending itself is a self-conscious version of an ascension narrative. It's a very 90deg turn ending to a book otherwise more interested in a world in which heaven is never accessible.
- mpalmer 7mo agoIt's the strongest possible memetic weapon humans would have - I think it's entirely consistent with the meta-nature of the book, especially the self-conscious part.
- mjburgess 7mo agoIf the take is religion is itself the weapon and the depiction given is mere evidence of that, OK, that's at least avoids the ending being totally awful. HOWEVER The book spends much of its time saying the transcendent cannot even be represented, to people, to us the read -- then just represents it, and in a tawdry christian way. I think the violation of that norm, as well as the ending being played straight -- with literally a long paragraph explaining with ideaspace is... that's a fourth-wall break into christianity imv Which makes the whole book read as, "the issue with humans is our physical bodies in a fallen world which are limited. just die, go to heaven, then you can know/represent/understand everything. Yay! Death!" OK. Just kinda naff. It reads as a religious person who accidentally wrote a good sci-fi book then hurridly, at the end, reminds us all that its really a parable with a Noble Message that in Death all things are trascended.
- doug_durham 7mo agoI read the book and at no time did I think "Christianity". It seems like motivated reasoning on your part. At no time did the book ever preach, or was even moralistic.
- 7mo ago
- gmuslera 7mo agoIt was a great book, but this review of it have its own value.
- throw4847285 7mo agoThis review is just a plot synopsis. There are no quotes from the book to give me a sense of the quality of the writing. The review feels targeted at somebody who is already bought into the premise, not somebody from the outside who wants to know if "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is a good book or not. In that sense, it totally fails as a book review.
- doug_durham 7mo agoI have never read a review and got a true notion of whether the prose is good or not. Is that really why you read reviews? I thought this was a great review because it very concisely described what is an unorthodox book. If you want to see if the prose is any good, read the book. It is a good book by the way.
- throwaway27448 7mo agoIt sounds like you're describing a summary (which does not deal with quality) rather than a review (which necessarily deals with quality). The posted writing seems to fall somewhere in between.
- throw4847285 7mo agoYes, I read reviews to learn if a book is good or not. Quotes from the book that are carefully selected often help to showcase what the author is capable of, on top of a clear description of their writing style. I want the reviewer to sell me on what moved them. That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.
- TZubiri 7mo agoThat's interesting, here's a perspective from a different type of reader. I tend to read very old books, usually non-fiction, so 'reviews' are usually wikipedia articles, or references by other authors (the more references the more a classic it is). usually it's the context around the book what people write about, where it was written, who wrote it, what was going on in their life. But if it's older perhaps not much is known, so the older it is increasingly it becomes at when it was read, where it was conserved, what it means to those who read it. If it's sufficiently old, there's several phases of 'rediscoveries' of the book, and the actual contents itself start losing importance as the book becomes more about past readers and how they influenced subsequent writing. It would never occur to you to decide whether to read Luca Pacioli's accounting treatise based on some passages describing how you should keep your daily book, or whether to read Deuteronomy based on the headcount of some obscure tribe from old middle east, like there's no banger it's more about inmersion, and there isn't one way to absorb and interpret the content, because we are so far away from its writing, that the connection between the writer and reader is very faint. So this feels normal to me, and the comparision felt funny, so I once again I found myself writing a hacker news comment
- measurablefunc 7mo agoWritten by AI.
- solsafe_dev 7mo ago[dead]
- solsafe_dev 7mo ago[dead]
- subjectsigma 7mo agoI listened to the Audible version and either I read a completely different book or the anti-memetic effects are real, because the main character in the article has a different name and the plot synopsis doesn’t seem to match up. My short review would be: the book is very one-note, it’s like a horror movie that keeps doing the same jumpscare over and over again. Despite this I managed to enjoy it.
- solstice 7mo agoThe author changed names for the revised edition to increase the distance to the SCP wiki.
- mjg2 7mo agoI just finished this book and complained about it the whole time. The prose is amateur and peppered with cliches (e.g. you should be fined for publishing the phrase "their suit was so sharp it could cut"). His attempt to write about the inner thoughts of the characters was pretty simple. The descriptions of violence and horror also felt child-like, especially the dialogue during those moments (e.g. Redd's introduction). The landscapes are bland, with lots of repetition. Personally, the redaction technique got boring fast when he would take up entire pages of the book to convey absent memories. He could use his words to convey this instead of black-boxes. I will give the author credit on how they deal with their characters' memories and the re-development of their thoughts, and the usage of time-jumping was reasonable (some books jump around too much, as if these time-skips improve a boring plot). Also the convention for how they solve their dilemma was enjoyable. Overall, I think the author relies too much on a vocal fandom around the SCP Foundation to glorify the book. I think there is potential for a saga of books but there needs to be more effort in the drafting and editing process to raise the quality of the books to the level the universe deserves.
- piskov 7mo agoHave you read free online version or 2025 edited/paid one from penguin books or what have you?
- mjg2 7mo agoThe 2025 edition from Penguin
- gravypod 7mo agoDo you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas? There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book. Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.
- SamoyedFurFluff 7mo ago
- pnw 7mo agoI read whatever version of this book was available to download in 2020 and really enjoyed it. Some very original ideas. I didn't find the writing clunky, and I read way too much.
- kiddico 7mo agoI read it in chunks from the wiki and feel the same. Maybe I'm not a discerning reader but it stayed in the front of my mind for a good few days after.
- krackers 7mo agoAre there any real-life examples of antimemes? How would antimemes even propagate given that they'd "die out" immediately?
- nusl 7mo agoIf they did, we wouldn't know. Those that do/did know would be dead.
- joombaga 7mo agoMaybe not exactly an antimeme, but my mind went to biology. Measles can destroy memory B-cells and T-cells, causing immunological amnesia. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1002885 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1002885
- krackers 7mo agoOh nice example! I guess more generally it's possible for an antimeme to spread if the mechanism of transmission doesn't involve conscious transmission.
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo agoThere is a genre of music that my old roommate was into which titled all of their songs and albums in obscure Unicode characters with no known pronunciation. Songs in this genre may not be perfect antimemes, but I think their resistance to reference is an antimemetic property. Also, chromosomes are nucleotide-encoded memes, and linear ones use teleomeres to impose limits on the number of replications they support, so that's another imperfect antimeme. I know of no antimemes whose antiemetic nature comes from their ability to interfere with the human mind, but then again, I wouldn't know about them if they existed, which is more or less the book's point.
- bluewin 7mo agoA malicious antimeme would be a dark pattern in web design for handling privacy/data/etc. Something designed to satisfy whatever law/regulation requires them to have the option while making the ability to find/remember/interact with it as hard as possible. Another candidate is the common usage of memory-holing, where important information is removed from public perception maliciously. The Dubai Chocolate thing technically falls into here, as does the whole "war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files" thing. Frankly the whole Epstein stuff is riddled with malicious memes and antimemes to deliberately muddy the waters. Similar to deliberate attempts to inject insane conspiracy beliefs "the moon controls our brains" into conspiracy theories that are too close to something real "mk-ultra". Consciousness for an antimeme is more of a classification error in my mind, as consciousness as a concept is permanently warped. But you could describe a secret society/dark family secret as a form of living antimeme, hiding some information and preventing it from being shared using a variety of means.
- walterbell 7mo agoShort film: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363133 My mission was to create a Sci-fi Noir episode of the Twilight Zone by way of David Lynch and Phillip K. Dick. Big shout out to Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller for speaking to my soul in Severance. And of course to the enigmatic QNTM for sparking my imagination with the original story, "We Need to Talk About 55". Long live the SCP Foundation.
- zuminator 7mo agoI happen to be in the middle of this book right now, so I only lightly skimmed tfa, but my copy is about Marie Quinn, not as Diehl says, Marion Wheeler. I do recall that name from an older, less cohesive 2020 ebook version that I had started reading years ago but set aside. Are there different protagonists in different markets? Or different perceived realities?
- prepend 7mo agoI bought it a few years ago before the new book deal and the name is Marion Wheeler. I believe it was self published back then. Although it’s a beautiful hard cover that was only like $14 on amazon. I found it funny that it’s one of my favorite recent hardcovers and is cheaper and self published.
- rienbdj 7mo agoIt was a fun read but I don’t understand the cult following this book has.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Animats 7mo agoFnord!
- agnishom 7mo agoI listened to 30% of the book on audio. I don't see a coherent plot so far. The first chapter is very fun to read. So is the second chapter, but to a lesser extent. But all the chapters seem to have the same gimmick, [Consider shocking scenario X if people were just forgetting certain things]. I also don't understand why the antimemes have physical manifestations. There doesn't have to be a reason, but this means that the story is no longer about the exploration of the central concept (antimemes).
- danpalmer 7mo agoI'm always surprised at the love TINAD gets, when I never hear "Ra" mentioned. From the same author, in my opinion a better story, doesn't rely on the whole SCP thing (which I never got into). TINAD didn't stick with me at all beyond the time I spent reading it, whereas Ra did in a way.
- valicord 7mo agoRa is great, and so is Fine Structure but they are both significantly longer than Antimemetics. Most people wouldn't read a massive novel publishing on some guy's personal website.
- danpalmer 7mo agoI got the ebook and the reading experience was like any other book. I haven't read Fine Structure, I'll give it a read!
- hifikuno 7mo agoOh man, Ra was fantastic. I love when you learn why magic was discovered in the year it was. It took me ages to correlate the two seemingly completely separate stories going on.
- omeysalvi 7mo agoThis review gives away too many key points in the story leading anyone who has read this before the book to anticipate what is going to happen. The reviewer should have added a note for spoilers before the review
- woolion 7mo agoI have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse. For example, knowledge of extremely rare diseases causes the mind to over-evaluate their importance by many orders of magnitude (there are many variants of this effect). Or trying to explain some concepts of the object/subject construction tend to use a language that is grounded on the concept of a shared objective reality that furthers from the concept true understanding -- in other words, "the tao that can be named is not the tao". I didn't think "There Is No Antimemetics Division" did very well with its premise, but the premise is quite fascinating, and it's the closest I've seen to this concept. Are there other explorations of similar ideas?
- GrinningFool 7mo ago"The Silence" in Doctor Who touches on similar themes. https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Silent#Amnesia_and_hypnotic_ability https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Silent#Amnesia_and_hypnotic_a...
- pitched 7mo agoThe opposite of this is also fascinating to me too. There are false beliefs that make people who hold them better in some metrics. Like, the idea that hard work leads to success. We all know there is some element of luck, but even so, people who discount luck and only believe in hard work tend to do better.
- woolion 7mo agoThat's a good point. I think this one can be easily be resolved on a factual level, since hard work is one of the few variables you can actually control. But it is more interesting from an emotional point of view, since in many cases that would an article of faith with the implicit fear that it might not be true. There are variations of this, such as composition theory in art getting good results based on completely false assumptions, but these tend to fall under epistemic underdetermination.
- sph 7mo ago> I have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse. There could be a hypothetical class of ideas that just knowing about them is actively harmful. For a fictional example, imagine learning how to detect a hostile alien race that has been living with us on earth all this time. Or if one day we invent a thought experiment that induces psychosis to anyone that tries to unravel it. I think the keyword for these type of ideas is infohazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard - the See Also section has a few interesting examples.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoWhy are there so many blank comments here?
- rluhar 7mo agoI've read both versions of the book and would strongly recommend the audiobook version that came out last year (it's available on Spotify). They did a good job handling the redactions and the narrator really brings the protagonist to life. A very strong recommend if you like audiobooks.
- Borrible 7mo agoForget about it. Read The Raw Shark Texts instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_Shark_Texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_Shark_Texts
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoI thought that was going to be related to Alan Moore and Watchmen. There's the comic within the comic where the protagonist eats raw shark and of course the link to the Rorschach character.
- low_tech_love 7mo agoI read this in the wiki format (I guess it’s mostly the same thing?) and thought it was a lot of fun, with may caveats (which is totally fine). My main criticism is that the idea of antimemetics in the book was let too loose, almost as if there are no limits whatsoever to what it can achieve, physically or psychologically, so that made it hard for me to wrap my head around the puzzle. There are basically no rules the universe of antimemetics, so the possibilities felt so massive and out of control that they did not fit into the paper so to speak. I feel like good SCP storytelling is usually harrowing but also “tangible”; there must be some set of rules that the universe adheres to so that we can join the mystery and explore the limits of what could happen (or be achieved) with that set of rules. When the effects of something are so broad that they completely rewrite the reality so as to e physically and mentally invincible/invisible, then the story feels more like a drop in an ocean rather than a complete product. Regardless, I enjoyed it!
- sevenseacat 7mo agoHuh, I just read this a couple of days ago. Found it fascinating. Though the version I read had a different name for the main character, and several other minor differences, to this review... I am confused.