An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties: something that, by its own nature, resists being described, recorded or remembered. Most are harmless. Some are not. Marie Quinn directs the Antimemetics Division of a secret organisation charged with containing anomalies nobody can hold in mind, and her staff stay functional only by taking mnestic drugs that let them perceive what is in front of them — at a steep and worsening cost to their health.
The Division's problem is structural rather than tactical. Its people cannot remember their own casualties, cannot brief one another reliably, and cannot be certain the enemy has not already been standing in the room. When a vast antimemetic entity begins consuming the organisation from within, Quinn has to fight something that deletes every plan made against it, including the memory that a plan was ever made. Much of the book is assembled from in-universe reports and documents, so the reader pieces the picture together in something like the way the characters do.
qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes, a British writer and software developer. He first wrote the story as web serials between 2015 and 2020, then compiled and self-published it as a novel in 2020. A substantially rewritten and expanded version — its third act reworked and the shared-universe references it grew out of removed — was published by Ballantine Books in the US and Del Rey in the UK in November 2025. That edition was shortlisted for the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was warmly received by The Washington Post, The Guardian and Kirkus Reviews.