"There is No Antimemetics Division" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*

[SFFBC, Ancillary Mod]

A few questions to get us started:


1. What did you think of the world?
2. What did you think of the characters?
3. What worked or didn't for you?
4. Overall thoughts?

[Pete Harris]

1. The world has similarities to Charles Stross’ Laundry Files and Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London in that it features a covert government organisation battling supernatural forces. It is wilder and crazier than either, making for an exhilarating ride but also perhaps straying too far from a coherent narrative.
2. The characters are not particularly deeply explored, or indeed go through much development. They really exist to enable the world building to happen around them.
3. Like most genuinely interesting speculative fiction, this works best on an allegorical level. This is a book for internet/social media/AI age, playing with the concept of the on line propgation of ideas, opinions, and misinformation. Narratively i did have concerns that it takes a step too far to the point of incomprehensibility.
4. What genre is it? Horror, SF, fantasy? Ive described it as speculative fiction as it doesnt fit easily into any of those buckets. It is perhaps closest to the darkness of China Mieville and the “New Weird”

[Kaia]

Overall, I liked this a lot. It was weird in a way that I tend to enjoy. It reminded me a little bit of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer - it's taking place in our world, but there is a layer of weirdness that you and the characters have to navigate and figure out.

I do agree with Pete that the characters are pretty flat - which I normally don't enjoy, but I think it worked here. The world and the Unknowns were the most interesting parts. I was still a bit sad that so many of the characters died, though by the end, their deaths made a sort of sense.

To me, along with the parallels with our current world of the spread of poisonous ideas and misinformation, the story also spoke to humanity making the same mistakes over and over and not learning from the past. Or that sometimes as the past become less connected to the present (there aren't living people who experienced and remember it), it can be easy for some people to start thinking that it didn't happen or fall prey to old ideas that were ruinous or harmful.

The only thing that didn't quite work for me was the ending, though I didn't dislike it. I just didn't quite buy that people were able to exist again after being taken over by U-3125 for such long time. They do point out that a lot of people disappeared, but it seemed implausible to me that the world returned to somewhat normal. I would have liked for it to end with Marie Quinn ascending and us not knowing what comes after (but maybe keep the last little bit of the epilogue with the cryptomorpha gigantes).