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.