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There Is No Antimemetics Division

There is No Antimemetics Division

Fraser Simons

The director of an ultra clandestine agency which is in charge of battling antimemes attempts to solve a puzzle which, by its nature is something she cannot remember. We jump around in time at various points in her life as small pieces are made known. 

If you’ve played the video game Control there are some aspects of this that are familiar. Objects that are usually innocuous have other properties that relate to these creatures that are not just in the peripheral, they cannot be perceived at all, without assistance. The agents of The Foundation have a drug that allows them to perceive some of these forces and therefor interact and combat them in various ways. But there are things far more complex than that at play that threaten the world. 

It’s frenetic in pacing for the first half and then almost meandering in the second. It retreads ground sometimes, annoyingly. And the quality of the prose is often uneven. There’s show-don’t-tell problems and a lack of a cohesive structure due to the framing device and, probably, the serialization of the content to begin with on the SCP Foundation Wiki page. 

It can be extremely fun to read at times because of the conceptual ideas and their role in the plot. Everything, essentially, is resolved via deus ex machina. Little to no foreshadowing used allows for any real kind of pleasure in the resolutions though, aside from the ending, which wove together some seemingly disparate threads. Most of the time the reaction I had was that it was an interesting idea and often pretty cinematic. And it kind of has to be because none of the unique content can actually be explained. This allows for a lot of latitude with the author with plot beats and devices, but also gives it a fan fiction feel sometimes and becomes very repetitive. 

Had the end chapter not brought together some of the threads from previous chapters, especially after instituting vastly different pacing and a reframing of point of view midway through, this would have been a 2 star read. Ultimately, while sophomoric and solipsistic—especially with thin characterization—I do feel like it had original ideas and that the macro ones were executed well.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

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