There Is No Antimemetics Division
There Is No Antimemetics Division
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qntm on There Is No Antimemetics Division
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The gap nobody else had filledqntm joined the SCP Foundation wiki, a collaborative fiction project built around cataloguing anomalous objects and events, in 2008. He found the existing entries rich in frightening things but missing an entire category: frightening ideas. That absence became his entry point.
My observation was that the contagiousness of an idea varies greatly. Some ideas are clearly less contagious than others. So, what’s at the bottom end of that scale? What ideas, truths or lies, are the most difficult to share? What ideas intrinsically resist being shared?
Following that question to its logical floor produced the book’s central concept. He gave it a precise definition before he gave it a story.
An antimeme: a thing you can’t think about, can’t describe, can’t document, can’t record, can’t study. A kind of ‘self-keeping secret.’
He wrote one wiki entry for the concept in 2008, filed under SCP-055, and left it alone for seven years. When he returned to it in 2015, the question had shifted from what an antimeme is to what living with one would actually demand, and the answers kept generating more material than any single entry could hold.
Let’s suppose this is a real phenomenon. What kind of organization could dealing with this kind of phenomenon? How would that organization have to operate? What kind of person would work there? And as I just kept digging into those questions, more and more story just showed up and I started writing.
The serialized result ran on the wiki from 2015 to 2020, accruing chapters as each new question produced the next.
This method of following a premise until it breaks is not specific to this book. A Signals From the Edge interview about a different project, his short story collection, reveals the habit he brings to every project, rooted in how he thinks about proof rather than plot.
What I like to do is to take a concept and run with it, stretching it to breaking point. I’ve always been a mathematically-minded person, and mathematics is all about making sure that you handle every single possible scenario, even the absolutely wild, near-unthinkable edge cases, because unless you handle every case, you don’t have a proof, you have a hole.
How he wrote it
Building a puzzle you can’t pre-solveBecause the book began as a wiki serial, each installment had to satisfy readers who might never return for the next. That constraint shaped the architecture of the whole, but it also created a problem: a chronological structure would have surrendered information the reader was not yet equipped to use.
I’m screwing around with memory. A lot of the characters in the story are having trouble with memory and they’re arriving at situations without really knowing what years of events have led up to those situations, what past decisions made by other people, or maybe by themselves, that they don’t remember. They’re just dropped in and I like to give the reader the same sort of feeling. I just drop them in, so a lot of these chapters come out of nowhere and blind you, so as the reader you’re like, ‘right, okay, I guess this is the scenario. Now I’ve got to deal with this.’
The non-linear structure was not only a way to disorient readers productively; it was also a solution to the specific technical problem of writing characters whose memories are actively unreliable. He named the alternative he was trying to approximate.
The flashbacks make it a complete story in retrospect, but they mean you aren’t second-guessing the characters. It’s the best alternative I have to actually erasing the readers’ memories.
Serializing on the wiki locked facts into place the moment readers encountered them. A detail that seemed inconsequential in an early chapter could become a structural problem fifteen chapters later, with no way to quietly revise it. The 2023 rewrite, his first opportunity to work with professional editors, was where those locked doors finally opened.
It is astounding what you can learn about your own book, and about how much better your own book can be, when you’re working with people who have been doing this successfully for years. We worked on everything from the grand overall arc of the narrative down to very minor individual word choices.
The revision process also required him to discard scenes he valued. One deleted passage showed protagonist Marion Wheeler’s years of eroded friendships, losses she had not consciously registered. He cut it not because it was weak but because its emotional register clashed with everything around it.
Sometimes you have to get brutal and cut perfectly good content because it isn’t appropriate to the tone of everything else. Film editors make equally tough calls all the time.
He posted an update to his Goodreads blog in September 2024, while the revision was still underway. The rewrite ran from 2023 through January 2025, with agent Caitlin Blasdell and Penguin editors Julian Pavia and Kate McHale. His assessment of where the draft stood at that point was unambiguous.
the draft of V2 in front of me is already (in my subjective opinion, if you value that) a mile beyond the original.
What he wants us to sit with
The things we choose not to knowHe frames the book as two problems that mirror each other rather than one. The first half is about knowledge that slips away before you can act on it; the second is about knowledge you actively keep at a distance until the cost of ignoring it becomes catastrophic.
There’s two aspects of this kind of thing. There’s ideas that you want to know, but you can’t hang onto them, they get away from you and what do you do about that? What kind of systems do you have to develop to handle that? And then on the flip side of it, the second half of the book is about the things that you really do need to know about, but that you kind of don’t want to and intentionally shut them out of your brain. You keep them in the background until the problem becomes so bad that you can’t ignore it anymore and things hit a tipping point.
The antimeme, in his account, is not a science-fictional invention with no anchor in ordinary life. He gave a list of things that already function this way, placing the novel’s monsters on a continuum that runs through recognizable human behavior.
dirty secrets, taboos, passwords, dreams, politically inconvenient historical facts, complex equations, boring tax code, injunctions and super-injunctions
The anomalous entities in the book occupy the far end of a scale that already includes the bureaucratic, the embarrassing, and the deliberately suppressed.
Readers who finish the book wanting more story will find that desire is intentional but limited. He drew a careful distinction between being left wanting more of a world and being left waiting for a resolution that should have been in the book you just read.
I consider this to be a very self-contained story. There are some mysteries which I left open because I wanted the reader not to know the answer.