There Is No Antimemetics Division

A fun, freaky sci-fi horror novel which was - gasp! - self-published by some guy. Well, I am here to say: that guy had some cool ideas! Bravo! Very inventive, in the vein of David Cronenberg (oh man, that body horror was gross-out wonderful), HP Lovecraft (cosmic uber-entities who are cruel and intent on fucking your shit up), and that one Dr. Who episode that was sooooo good.

The premise: there is a secret organization called the Foundation. It's their job to protect humanity from other-worldly, supernatural threats. So far so standard. The inventiveness of author Sam Hughes is in the quality of the threat: the Foundation is up against both “memetic” and “antimemetic” entities - that is, ideas that are either dangerously viral (and thus insidious and infiltrating into humanity's consciousness), or aggressively un-seeable/forgettable. The antimemetics are - mwah - chef's kiss. Since the Foundation characters often begin to realize - and the writing does a decent job of capturing - that they are having some severe short term memory loss, often on the fly and while running away from a scary antimeme manifesting as a creepy corporate man. This was like if Alzheimer's had a will of its own and that will was pure evil. These memetic and antimemetic supernatural thingies mostly exist in the inscrutable, Lovecraftian “aether” - the MIND SPACE, if you will - but sometimes they also take physical form as, amusingly, super disgusting body horror monsters.

There is quite a bit of gore - almost a bit too much for me - and the plot is circuitous, with many false starts and false ends and forgotten bits and re-done bits. I didn't really try to follow it too closely. I was mostly along for the ride. Oh yes, and it did remind me of another wonderful, fun body horror geeky sci-fi book, which was Greg Bear's Blood Music. This was a similarly pulpy - PUN SORT OF INTENDED - story that was both an enjoyable thought experiment (how to defeat an enemy that keeps rewriting your history?) and a fast-paced thriller.