by Del Rey, a process that Hughes describes as “very difficult and tremendously positive”. Set in an alternate version of our world, There
Is No Antimemetics Division follows Marie Quinn, the “highly competent” chief of the Antimemetics Division, as she begins to realise the Division has been at war for years with an entity that will kill you once you remember or perceive it. How do you fight an enemy that you cannot remember without dying? The second half of the novel deals with the nightmarish fallout of this fight. The book is a masterclass in SF writing.
Hughes deftly builds the eerie atmosphere of Marie and the Division’s work and trusts the reader to keep up with his ferocious pacing. The world-building is subtle but confronting. The main narrative is interspersed with Division logs that catalogue various Unknowns. The first Division log describes Unknown 0055, which “may present a major physical threat and indeed may have killed hundreds of personnel, and we would not know it”. To combat the self-censoring properties of the
Unknowns, Division workers take amnestic drugs to reinforce their memory. But it is not a perfect system. The gaps in Marie’s memory materialise on the page with jumps forwards and backwards in time that reveal inconsistencies in her experi- ence. Parts of the novel are also redacted – small and large sections of text are blacked out. “Every single redaction in the book conceals real text,” explains Hughes. Sometimes the reader can infer what the missing text is, but in a particularly gory passage, the reader’s imagination is left reeling. There is the sense that the Unknowns are consuming the novel as you read it. There Is No Antimemetics Division explores
both what happens when we need to – but cannot – remember something and the impact of choos- ing to forget a particular experience or event. The novel asks: “What if there is something that we don’t remember and should be remembering that’s really important and, on the flip side, what is it that we are remembering [instead]?”
experiences and the experiences of those around us and the novel exploits this fear. “That’s fully intentional,” says Hughes. “Broadly speaking the first half of the book is, to a certain extent, about dementia. It’s about losing your critical faculties to a force that is beyond your control and building systems to try to manage that. There is an external aggressor at work, but ultimately Marie is at war with her own failing memory and she puts up a good fight.”
H
ughes’ biography states “his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond”.
It is a “very analytical” approach influenced by his career as a software developer where he works “with systems being pushed to the limit”. “We’re trained to think about the extremes
and follow the logical possibilities,” he explains. “I find the same can be true in fiction and story- telling where you come up with an interesting premise. What I then do is turn the handle until it reaches breaking point then I keep going past the breaking point. What I find is often very interesting things start happening.” For There Is No Antimemetics Division, he
hypothesised that the “human ecosystem of ideas” is now threatened by a predator that “oblit- erates that ecosystem completely”. To deal with the “ramifications and consequences” of such an enemy, Hughes needed his characters “to be smart enough” to work through the same logic as him. Marie and her colleagues were the answer. “There’s this monster you can only fight in a closed unit in which you can think about the monster, because otherwise the monster will get you because it knows that you’re thinking about it,” he says. “So, I needed characters who are smart enough to build the closed unit from scratch without knowing what they were doing, and then go inside and start working on the problem.” It is “difficult” to tell stories about entities
There is a tremendous amount of history about unreliable narrators… in my story we have people who are in an unreliable reality
Humans possess “finite memory” and so the memories we store are significant. In the novel, Marie and her colleagues push their ability to remember to the limit, but with each memory they store about the Unknowns something else must be sacrificed. By examining this aspect of the human condition, Hughes excavates how it is that humanity continues to function through existential threats. “Humans can walk away from, and forget, anything. Civilisation can go back to ‘normal’ after anything,” he writes. Memory loss is a very primal fear, I suggest
to Hughes. In many ways, it poses an existential threat; our identities are bound up in our
that cannot be remembered by your characters, he concedes. “The interesting thing about antimemetics is that it’s actually a very compli- cated thing to think about. If your own memory becomes fallible that becomes very interesting. There is a tremendous amount of history about unreliable narrators, people who are telling a story you can’t trust, and then in my story we have people [who are] in an unreliable reality. They think they know what’s happened, but what they know is no longer correct or they don’t know what’s happened at all.” By happenstance, There Is No Antimemetics Division is being released on 11th November, Remembrance Day in the UK. Although the novel “isn’t really leaning into those themes of remembrance”, it nevertheless offers a thought- ful examination of how the human condition is irrevocably bound up in what we remember, what we forget and what we choose, or are forced, to forget. Hughes’ novel is a propulsive, haunting story that heralds an important new voice in science fiction.
09
Extract
Quinn takes a shallow breath. She glances sideways at the gun. Levene hasn’t moved. “Mr Mahlo, you know me. We’ve met several times. I’m your chief of Antimemetics.” “We don’t have an Antimemetics Division,” Levene says. “…Mr Levene is mistaken,” Quinn says, to Mahlo. “The Organisation has a research division for every class of Unknown and more. Telepathics, Inanimates, Cryptozoology. My division doesn’t always show up in the listing. It’s not something we can help. It’s the nature of the work we do.” She hesitates. Silence from the other two. But she hasn’t been told to stop. Another glance at the gun. She needs a raise.
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