• Author: qntm
  • Full Title: There Is No Antimemetics Division
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

This book is incredible.

A mix of Lovecraftian horror, modern science fiction, and absurdist humor. I loved it. Definitely a contender for book of the year for me, and it's not even close.

Highlights

  • “There are Unknowns with antimemetic properties,” Quinn goes on. “There are ideas that cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. (Location 160)
  • “We think an idea stole into their culture that they did not have adaptations to defend against. A Category Epsilon idea complex. They may have fought it. But, ultimately, their culture is buried beneath that idea.” (Location 974)
  • “Ideas can be killed,” she says, stepping into the airlock. “How?” “With better ideas.” (Location 1756)
  • 2200 is a heavily worn, approximately egg-shaped 1.07-meter-tall monolith of tenasserite limestone inhabited by Gua, a non-corporeal entity that claims to be the prehistoric Johorean god of forgetting how to ride a bicycle. (Location 1830)
  • It calls this “the Bicyclecycle.” It (Location 1853)
  • Hix stares darkly at his paper. “We could exterminate all intelligent human life,” he says. “If there are no sapient hosts in this universe, U-3125 can’t incarnate.” (Location 2915)
  • Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition. Beneath it, within its context, everything becomes corrupted into the worst version of itself. It takes joy and turns it into vindictive glee; it takes self-reliance and turns it into solipsistic psychosis; it turns love into smothering assault, pride into humiliation, families into traps, safety into paranoia, peace into discontent. It turns people into people who do not see people as people. And civilizations, ultimately, into abominations. (Location 3466)
  • In the presence of WILD LIGHT, vast tracts of U-3125, thought to meaningfully exist, prove not to. U-3125 is, in the new context that WILD LIGHT provides, an ancient irrelevance. (Location 3479)