There is no Antimimetics Division (SF)

There is no Antimimetics Division (SF) - qntm *****

Without doubt one of the most original science fiction books I've ever read. With a mix of narrative and reports (featuring occasional redaction-like antimimetic decays) we are introduced to the work of the Organisation, which takes on weird happenings in the world, from conventional monsters and ghosts to those central to this story. A large contingent of Organisation staff deal with mimetics - ways that concepts can spread in a non-natural fashion and have to be controlled. But a smaller group deals with antimimetics - concepts and even living things that are able to remove themselves from human memory.

One of our first introductions to antimimetics is when a senior civil servant summons a supposed spy to his office, only to discover that she is in fact the head of the Antimimetics Division: an antimimetic has stopped the civil servant from taking the medication that enables him to remember the Division's existence, so he is totally unaware of it.

This kind of convoluted complexity continues to get deeper through the book - there felt like a parallel here with the engaging way that the movie Inception takes us into multiple layers of dreaming. We discover that there are hugely significant things that have happened in the past of the Antimimetics Division and its predecessors which they themselves don't remember.

There's no doubt that qntm likes a challenge - the big bad here is so dangerous that simply being aware of it gets you killed. It seems impossible that there will ever be a solution, but if anyone can do it, it's the Antimimetics Division. Although there is an element of 'love transcends all' towards the end, this is a cold book: it's hard to engage with any of the characters, who are rarely given any depth. But in the end it's a book of magnificent ideas - ideas that in this case can become physically substantial. Arguably, the ending feels a touch deus ex machina, but it doesn't stop this being a remarkable piece of work.

One minor moan - I'm not sure the book has been properly copy edited as someone appears to have done a search and replace to change the US spelling of the distance unit a meter to the UK spelling metre, without noticing it has produced perimetre and diametre. Still, while I might struggle slightly with antimimetics (surely the division is anti-antimimetic?), or that a person of Sam Hughes' age should still think it's cool to refer to himself as qntm, this was an amazing read.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Search This Blog