THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION

A highly secretive intelligence agency fights an underground war against an enemy it can never remember.

Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Nominally, it’s offered here as a series of interconnected short stories, field reports, and other interstitial components of a larger mythology. In these Twilight Zone-quality twists, we learn that our protagonist, Marie Quinn, leads a particular division at the Organization—imagine an international spy agency with G.I. Joe’s budget and The X-Files’ mandate—that locks down “antimemetics,” or ideas that cannot be spread or retained. In other words, how do you fight a war you can never remember exists? “It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and…sometimes…segments of reality,” the book explains. “Sometimes, people.” Normally the project’s fragmented, nonlinear nature might work against it, but not here. Though he cleverly stitches everything into a whole after the fact, qntm weaves the novel’s fundamental, world-altering conflict underneath a whole lot of noodle-bending quantum mechanics. There’s even a little romance as we meet Adam Quinn, Marie’s hopelessly normal husband, as he struggles to help his wife remember him, let alone reconnect with her. The disposable nature of most characters doesn’t generate a lot of sympathy, it’s true. But simultaneously solving the linguistic gymnastics around arcane physics and spooking the bejesus out of readers is no mean trick. Much like a first viewing of The Matrix, a clever twist matched with an adversary this unstoppable is both cool and unsettling. The answer? “Ideas can be killed,” says Quinn. “With better ideas.”

A quixotic science-fictional universe that plays with memory as much as calamity physics.