Colorless █​█​█​█​█ Ideas: There Is No Antimemetics Division Review

There Is No Antimemetics Division reminded me why I keep coming back to speculative fiction.

Here's a short excerpt from qntm's novel There Is No Antimemetics Division:

Kim is so deeply buried in work at his terminal and the airlock is so quiet that he almost doesn't notice when it starts to cycle open again.

"We need to check you for notes," he begins, but then he sees that Marion Wheeler is curled up in the bottom of the narrow cylinder, panting as though she just finished a marathon run. Kim holds a hand out but she shakes her head, electing to stay lying down, knees bent up to her chest, sucking down lungfuls of air.

"What in the world happened in there?" Kim asks.

"Just need…" she gasps, "…to breathe. Be okay in a… second. Haaaaah. I think I blacked out for a moment, might have inhaled some. Haaaaah. I think I'm okay. I remember the plan."

Kim looks confused and worried for a second, then they replace him. "You shouldn't be able to remember anything… what did you do?"

Look at the bolded line. I couldn't make heads or tails of that the first time I read it. It's grammatically weird because "they" as a pronoun has an ambiguous referent. Typically one would expect an antecedent--a noun that a pronoun refers to--somewhere in the sentence or at least the paragraphs before that pronoun pops up. So, I fumble around for a second. Could it be a bizarre, metaphorical way to refer to the verb phrase in the sentence, like, confusion and worry "replace him", like completely consume all his thoughts? A pretty, if strange, turn of phrase. But no, "they" is an external entity. I might have understood more readily if the pronoun was "IT replaces him", but that's part of the fun of the sentence. Because in the span of a few words, having been exposed for just a few seconds to a toxic idea, agent Paul Kim is hollowed out and replaced as a person, and if you knew who "they" are, doing the replacing, you'd already be replaced too.

To know the antecedent is to be consumed by it.

That's the hook of There Is No Antimemetics Division. Antimemes are self-redacting concepts, and the story, told episodically and nonlinearly through a series of encounters with antimemetic anomalies, is about an antimeme so vast and monstrous that it ends the world. That probably sounds familiar if you were a Magnus Archives fan; Antimemetics Division is basically like that but more compressed, chaotic, and... seemingly more sincere about being a Creative Commons work. The novel only exists, after all, because of the creative commons work of countless contributors to the SCP Wiki, a large collaborative fiction writing project about the titular SCP Foundation. This organization exists to Secure, Contain, and Protect dangerous anomalies. The novel, then, poses a specific challenge to the Foundation: how do you contain a threat you can't remember?

I wasn't more than passingly familiar with that whole backdrop of SCP writing when I picked the story up in physical novel form, mind. For me, "keter class" or "O5" and other such jargon held about as much meaning as "Daleks" or "sonic screwdriver" did when I first jumped into Doctor Who: extended lore whose pertinent details I had faith I could pick up from context clues. Going in with an attitude of "I'll understand what I don't understand when it's time to understand it" actually served me well: like I said, this is an episodic and nonlinear narrative, sometimes tossing in entire chapters of seemingly arbitrary epistolary side-materials (official documents that are the SCP wiki's bread and butter) that only become relevant much later. Maybe it's strange to read a work of web fiction in novel form, but I actually found that the linear structure of a physical book helped to assert the chronological nonlinearity, where a wiki might inspire a more direct progression through the plot, or skipping the seemingly extraneous chapters. It also allowed me to flip rapidly back through the text I had already read, a process that became steadily more necessary to piece the story together.

Doing so poses a bit of a puzzle, actually, because part of the premise is that characters are constantly having their memories wiped by psychic parasites. They repeat their actions, have many "first days on the job" (a good antimemetics division agent is one who can reboot their personality and skill set rapidly from inference and muscle memory), and operate on conjecture about things that, by definition, they cannot remember. It's a story about and consisting of negative space.

So, a sentence like "Kim looks confused and worried for a second, then they replace him" is this really great metonym for the whole novel's structure and premise. It depends, grammatically, on a missing antecedent. I'm still not even really sure "they" is the right pronoun here, or who "they" are. It's incredibly unclear to me just what SCP-3125 consists of besides "nightmare" and "spiders" and "one smug, shitty incel". That's sort of the point, after all. So the book has this constant off kilter feeling, like taking a step forward and finding that instead of the rest of the staircase you expected there's just floor. Overbalanced. Things occur without their motivating force being apparent to the reader. Actually, I had a whole anecdote planned about how the structure of the sentence, with its abrupt grammatical turn that demands backtracking and reconsideration to infer meaning, mirrors a whole section of the book where I had to backtrack and reread. I did that a bunch of times, really, but this was so perfect, just a crackerjack, great example. But I didn't write it down when I read it, and now I forget what it was. Embarrassing. Who needs antimemes when you've got my scatterbrain?

But what I can say is that all this stuff feels deliberate and considered. Even with an out of order release on the SCP website, qntm could have repackaged the book in a more linear, streamlined order, but didn't. He's willing to throw up speedbumps to the reader in a way that I'm not used to seeing from plot-driven, streamlined web fiction, or really even a lot of other serial storytelling. Forget movies, even tv shows mostly don't explore these sorts of shifts in perspective for entire "episodes". Can you imagine the studio notes? "Why are you spending all this time on these 'really tall things', what about the plot?" And judging from how mad people get about "filler episodes", the studio notes would be depressingly right! No, this kind of structural experimentation either comes from fiction of a more "high art" section of the industry, where return on investment comes from long term cultural cache, or it comes from the gutter, with stuff like Doctor Who audios, Vertigo comics, or niche-audience web- and fanfiction.

Here's another thing I'm unused to: the novel actually does spend a fair few of its words on descriptive details! If you listened to some of the early episodes of Read One Other Book: The Grapes of Wrath or the Worm Ouroboros bonus episodes you know I'm a pervert for poetic description. qntm isn't Steinbeck or Eddison, mind. His prose is functional far more than it is lush. This still feels like a rarity to me among web and fanfiction cultures, which right now have settled on a relatively "invisible" prose that leaves me feeling parched and weightless. While a lot of web fiction of various media seems to aspire to be stories of ideas, at least in the sense of a fixation on mechanics, twists and turns based on the setting premises and so on, they wind up being stories of TV plots, with prose that reads more like stage directions and casting notes pasted around a script.

This isn't just a stylistic beef--it impacts what information the story can convey, and qntm's willingness to sit in a character's perceptions for a while serves the story well. In one scene, for example, the character Hughes gets to internally monologue about the hostile sterility of most Foundation architecture, and express gratitude that the antimemetic meeting room he's just entered is more stylish. It's an interesting and even important little character moment: Hughes is essential to developing the Foundation's weapon against SCP-3125, but he also repeatedly evinces a skepticism about the Foundation. He's not a zealot for the cause. That paradox is central to the story's uneasy problematic, where the Foundation is both the one thing that can stand against the nightmare Bad Idea threatening to eat humanity whole, but also deeply insufficient to the task and seemingly incapable of the self reflection necessary to get better. Hughes's own hesitation renders him incapable of activating the weapon only he can design and build. This notion gets seeded in the first moments when we inhabit his gaze as readers, walking through a warehouse full of megafauna bones.

Also, there's the implication that, due to the nature of antimemes, Hughes might like the interior of the meeting room because he designed it himself. Another thing I like about qntm is that he has the same amount of fun playing around with the premise of "antimemes" as Andrew Hussie or Steven Moffat do with "time loops", or Lawrence Miles has playing with "memes" in the first place in Faction Paradox. It's like he's constantly asking, what can I do here that I can't do in any other story that lacks this core premise? That's speculative fiction, baby, awoo! (wolf howl)

But as speculative fiction, it's not so much of the classical Asimov-ian vein but rather the wild New Wave of the 70s. This is speculative fiction interested with language as much as engineering. The novel repeatedly makes reference, most notably, to the famous "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", Noam Chomsky's evocative example of grammatical correctness paired with gibberish meaning. The book seems to suggest, albeit obliquely through chapter titles, that such a nonsyntactical sentence which is nevertheless shaped like a rational human thought may in fact be sign of an aberrant entity invading human ideaspace. Maybe there's something to that: after all, hasn't this meaningless sentence been interpreted poetically countless times, enjoying seven decades of fame and fascination? It's this fascination with the idea that a grammar, a structure, might transmit an alien notion, that drives the book, and it's this fascination with structure that makes There Is No Antimemetics Division so galvanizing.

Well, not all, there's also the characters, like the reluctant genius Hughes, the coincidentally gifted violinist Adam, and above all else the intrepid true believer Marion Wheeler, scarily competent at her job, a middle aged bureaucrat with nerves of steel and a razor blade mind. There's the emotional highs and lows, finding out a character has survived a seeming demise, only to find, along side grief stricken friends we had never encountered up till that point, that the character was irreparably damaged in the course of their escape. Going back frantically to an earlier, baffling chapter to discover, oh, yes, this character escaped by- but, that means that now he's- my god! You know I don't want to give the impression that this isn't an awesome piece of pulp fiction as well, just cause I'm a structure pervert!

Still, it's the willingness to write weird speedbump sentences or drop in less easily digested chapters, though, the way the book always is pushing, urging the reader to think a little ahead, to cast back and put the pieces together, to really engage, that makes the book so thrilling to me. It's speculative fiction that asks the reader to speculate, too.

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