There is No Antimemetics Division

I’m reading the newly released verion of “There Is No Antimemetics Division” by qntm and its been a strange experience!

I’ve been a fan of qntm for years, and first read the story in its original form on the shared world building forum the SCP Foundation.

SCP is an effort in shared worldbuilding, about a fictional three-letter agency that aims to “secure, contain, and protect” supernatural anomalies.

SCP stories usually start as a clerical write-up of some numbered SCP entity (e.g. SCP-055), presented as if a researcher from the agency had written it. They then often expand into more traditional prose, sometimes with multi-media aspects mixed in.

It’s very much a creation of the web, and while I’m not the biggest SCP reader, I love the idea of it, and the communal nature of it. Like fanfiction, it’s a sandbox for (especially beginner) writers to play around in, and has spawned some commercially successful derivitive works like the 2019 videogame Control. ¹

The first Antimemetics story was SCP-055, published to the SCP forum in 2008. It was an SCP report of a captured “antimeme”, an idea with self-censoring properties that erased itself from the memories of anybody who learned of its existence.

Seven years later, in 2015, qntm would begin writing a series of stories exploring the antimeme concept begun in SCP-055.

The first set of the stories (collected online as “There is No Antimemetics Division”) are standalone vignette about different antimemes, whereas the next set (“Five Five Five Five Five”) follow a singular protagonist, Marion Wheeler, as she struggles to learn about, and save humanity from, a host of antimemetic entities.

The antimemetics stories gained a large following within the forum (I think SCP-055 quickly became one of the top-rated SCPs), but they never quite escaped containment into the mainstream sci-fi culture.

In 2021, qntm self-published the whole collection of stories in a paperback novel on Amazon titled “There is No Antimemetics Division”. It got some attention from people outside of the SCP space, it was by-far his most popular book, but it wasn’t exactly a NYT Bestseller.

Fast forward to 2024 though, and there’s now two short-film adaptations (you can see one of them on Youtube here, I haven’t watched it yet), and qntm is announcing a publishing deal with Penguin for a new book, as well as a re-printing of the antimemetics novel.

The only catch: he has to remove all references to the SCP project from his work. To quote his blog post announcing the deal:

[scrubbing the SCP elements] had to be done in order to get published. There was absolutely no other way that this was ever going to happen.

To his credit, he was adamant that the original online version stay up, which is apparently rare with these sorts of “webserial => traditional publishing” deals.

The original paperback was removed from Amazon (people are listing it for $300 on ebay, which, if people are actually buying it, would make my copy by far the most expensive book I own…), and all references to SCP have been removed from the new release (sans a short call-out in the Acknowledgments, and a metion in the 8-pt legalese at the beginning of the book).

This makes me super sad.

The project would never have been born without the SCP community, and now the existence of that community has been erased from its most popular work at the behest of a continent-spanning inhuman behemoth.

It’s all so very on the nose.

The 2025 release seems to be a bigger success than the original 2021 version. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few different book spaces I’m in and it seems to be getting some attention from the more mainstream media.

I’m still sad about the whole situation, but I don’t feel any negativity towards qntm for the deal he made. I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time and am glad that he’s getting the recognition (and hopefully some of that traditional publishing money) that I feel he deserves.

I am enjoying reading the 2025 book. The meta experience of having faded memories of a different version of a story about memory-eating monsters is fun, in a twisted way.

I’m only on the second chapter, so I don’t have many comments to make about the changes yet.

I will say that the “Unknown Organization” is a pale copy of the SCP Foundation. Removed from the broader SCP context, built up by many authors over many years, the “UO” feels fake, shallow, and much less menacing.

I have to suspend my disbelief more to swallow it – which makes sense, because the history that the Penguin has tried to erase is just under the surface of my mind, trying to reassert itself.

I hear that the last arc has been much improved from the original, which is nice since it was definitely weaker than the rest of the book.

I’ll update this blog post with my full thoughts about the new story once I’ve finished it. Until then, stay safe out there everybody.

Update: Thoughts after finishing

I feel much sadder now about the changes than I did when I wrote the original blog post.

In my opinion, the thing that makes these Antimemetic stories work, made them resonate with so many people, is that they’re even better than “show not tell”, they’re “feel not show”.

In another horror story, you would see the scary monster enter the picture and start eating people, see people running around in terror.

You may feel dread as you wait for the monster to strike, but the majority of the pathos comes from witnessing the protagonists reacting to the situation.

By contrast, in The Antimemetics Division, the characters don’t even know that they’re under attack.

Over the course of the story you, the reader, start putting the pieces together. You think to yourself:

“Last chapter it said the Antimemetics Division had 2,000 employees, but now there’s only 1,200.”

“The division used to exist in the 70s? Or, maybe in the 40s?”

“Wait, I thought it said in the first chapter that Quinn was married with two kids.”

And though the characters have no idea, you the reader begin to understand what’s missing. You realize what the characters have lost, and you feel the dread and horror that they cannot.

It’s such an effective way to bring the reader into the story. In some ways, by the end, the readers are even more invested than the protagonists.

I felt that same sense of impending dread as I read the Penguin version, but this time about the real world, as I discovered what had been removed from the original story.

The new novel definitely has some improvements over the original. The writing has been edited and polished and generally reads a lot better. The plot wasn’t really changed, but some bits of it, especially at the end, were fleshed out in pleasing ways.

The inclusion of the extra side-story Wheeler’s God was especially good, since it wasn’t in the original paperback and I actually had never read it!

But these improvements feel like poor trades for the removal of the SCPs, and the online community that created them, from the book.

All SCP stories, including the Antimemetics Division, are built around an SCP, a “Special Containment Procedure”.

These SCPs are documents detailing how some supernatural entity has been contained by the Foundation, written in clinical scientifc language.

While some SCP stories add prose or other kinds of content, the SCP document is the heart of it. Some stories are only that document, and the trick is to tell an interesting story within that constrained medium.

Here’s a couple of my favorite SCP document-only stories:

• SCP-2521
• SCP-8900

The Antimemetics stories broke from those constraints pretty quickly. The very first one, SCP-055 is a pure SCP document, but they become less SCP focused over time, with the last half or so stories being only prose.

I think this was generally accepted by the SCP community, since the stories clearly have a foundation in the SCP world, and they’re so compelling.

This prose-first format carries over into the new novel, but even more so, as some of the SCPs have been edited out entirely.

In the new novel, the few “UO documents” that do exist now feel out-of-place. They’re the lingering vestiges of a web-culture that has otherwise been erased – if I was the Penguin editor I might’ve cut them entirely, since they don’t add much to the telling.

I’m sure that would’ve broken qntm’s heart.

There’s a few other places where qntm leaves nods to the original SCP stories. One of them is a small joke that he added at the end of the new novel (it’s not in the original):

Aside, he adds, “I lost a lot of time in your database. That dry house style of yours makes for bizarrely compelling reading.

It’s a line that probably doesn’t make sense to people who have only read the new version, but it hit me like a train.

Because I remember what’s been erased.

I remember the larger SCP Foundation, I remember the love these stories got.

The fanart people made:

The Antimemetics spinoffs they wrote:

And the heartfelt comments they left about how these were some of the best stories to come out of the SCP community:

I’m sure that many of the people that are reading the Antimemetics Division for the first time, with this new novel, would find something to enjoy in the broader SCP Foundation.

Maybe they’d find themselves sucked in to some other story that keeps them up at night, or get into a back-and-forth in the discussion sections.

Maybe they’d even be inspired to write a new SCP themselves.

But no.

Penguin made sure that there’s nary a breadcrumb in the new novel that might lead new readers back to the SCP forums.

I feel so sad that, in the real world, SCP-3125 is the one that wins.

As always, qntm says it best:

And I wonder: what was the Foundation’s role in this? Were we witness to this anomaly? Were we the ones who defeated it? Did we resist? Negotiate? Participate?

- qntm