Kev Nickells's Reviews > There Is No Antimemetics Division

I'm not much of a one for sci-fi or fantasy or narrative fiction so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on this. But FWIW I enjoyed it muchly.

I don't want to give too much away but the premise, such as it is, deals with antimemetics - an agency devoted to documenting and handling Unknowns. Per se I'd probably say this is dystopian, insofar as the agency never quite qualifies itself as successful. The fiddly part of this is that Unknowns are typically hidden from view and deliberately un-knowable. And so the caprice of mnestics operates within the antimimetics division - means of not-forgetting or rendering manifest the Unknowns.

Now that could've been a convoluted mess but qntm deals with it well. I've seen some reviews saying this book is difficult to follow and I'd probably agree there are degrees of opacity, as well as a non-continuous narrative. For my money that's all spice to the soup though - as the main storyline deals in opacity and oblique presences, so too does the structure appear discontinuous and foggy.

The thing for me that probably interests me most is the metaphors that arise from the principle of seeing-the-unseen. You can read a few narratives into that - Theological ones, magical ones, technological ones (insofar as our very-digital world is often abstractions obscuring abstractions), political ones... the mechanics of hypostasis (in its many definitions), the perilousness of unseen malicious presences. Perhaps there's also the political ambiguity of conspiracy there - per se we know that state-level conspiracies have happened, which doesn't qualify all conspiracy; but the germ of speculation (as in, to see through the deliberately-obscured) easily grows into neo-fascist conspiracy (or decent political analysis).

So all of that is kind of speculative 'what next...' for the concepts in this book. It's probably the case that not everyone cares about that stuff, and good for them. I'd say the engine of suspense here works because there's a very broad conceptual field that's activated as maliciously opaque, at once everyday and fantastical. I liked this book a lot.