There Is No Antimemetics Division

Marie Quinn runs the Antimemetics Division, a department of a secret organisation whose job is to contain anomalies that nobody can keep in mind. An antimeme is an idea that resists being described, recorded or remembered. Most are harmless. Some are not.

Her staff can only perceive what is in front of them by taking mnestic drugs, and the drugs wear down their health, at a cost that keeps rising. The Division's trouble is built into its work. Its people forget their own dead, cannot reliably brief one another, and can never be sure the enemy is not already in the room.

Then a vast antimemetic entity starts to consume the organisation from the inside. Quinn has to fight something that erases every plan made against it, along with the memory that a plan existed at all.

This is science fiction with a horror edge, told partly through reports and documents set inside its own world. The reader assembles events piece by piece, much as the characters must, and the effect is disorienting by design.

The book began as web serials published between 2015 and 2020, and was self-published as a novel in 2020. The edition described here is a substantial rewrite with a reworked third act. Ballantine Books brought it out in the US in November 2025, with Del Rey handling the UK. It was shortlisted for the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award.