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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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