Preface: I’m not sure if this will turn out to be a long review, because I kind of want to keep this short. If you haven’t read the book, please stop reading here and read the book. Spoilers will ruin your experience of reading this, even if you do not usually mind them.
This is the first book that excited me so much since I read Hyperion more than ten years ago, or maybe when I read The Fifth Season right around the pandemic. This is equal parts scary, and equal parts enthralling, like the title suggests, and I could not put it down. When I had to do other things in the space between reading the book, I was thinking of the book. It doesn’t let you go, it probably will stay in my brain, rent-free, from now.
In the world of these book, there are memes – ideas, beings which spread like a wildfire phenomenon through the population, and anti-memes – ideas and/or beings whose knowledge is hard to come by, and even if you happen to see/understand/comprehend one, they are actively camouflaging themselves, some of them even erasing your memory of ever having seen them from your brain. Some of these entities also love to devour information, and in the process erase things and even living beings. There’s a governmental group, simply known as The Organisation, a branch of which is the eponymous Anti-Memetic division, whose function is to not let memetic ideas take over, and protect the people from anti-memes, which can get pretty deadly and delete blocks of city and people in order to keep themselves a secret.
Many of these entities or Unknowns are given a U-XXXX designation, XXXX being a number. There are some fairly benign ones, like U-4987, adorably nicknamed Sunshine since it appears like a lens flare on the periphery of your vision, and it loves to consume memories and facts, and one of the protagonists of the story Marie Quinn, was able to domesticate it by feeding it random facts she consumed for the express purpose of feeding it. There is U-2256 (Cryptomorpha gigantes), giant dinosaur like gigafauna which evolved their own anti-memetic field as a protective measure. Polynesian natives used to get high on a psychedelic drug and used to be able to see them faintly, and worshipped them as “wandering spirits”. Unfortunately, being observed or having facts about them written anywhere were deleterious for them, and the very act of being observes led to them going extinct. Then there are others like U-7175 (“Adrian Gage”) which can be fatally harmful – it is described as an slow-acting, antimematic kill agent which get attracted to dense-clusters of organically stored information, i.e., brains with a lot of knowledge, isolates them from the world using a strong anti-memetic field, so that its subject cannot interact with the world, and starts slowly devouring their memories and knowledge until they are a vegetable. All these Unknowns are categorised into groups based on how threatening they are, U-7175 being a ε1 entity.
Then there are entities like U-3125 which is a category Γ unknown, knowledge of which is fatal. This is an entity which actively eliminates living beings which come to know of it. Let me quote the part from the book where we first come to know of it, instead of me describing it.
Hilton locks eyes with her. “It came at us. We weren’t prepared to be attacked directly. It was eating my division alive. It came at us so hard and so fast that the only way we could stop it was to self-destruct. If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And it hates to be seen.”
Apparently, humanity has been locked in a vicious cycle with this being. Every time, people from the organisation who have memetic training became skilled enough to figure out the existence of this thing, they tried to destroy it unsuccessfully, eventually having to deploy a mnestic bomb to make themselves forget its existence. The anti-memetic division has been founded at least twice, probably more than that, and each time they have to start from scratch, sacrificing all of their knowledge, including regarding U-3125.
I’m not going to talk about how this book ends. I do not particularly like it, but with having almost omnipotent beings come into prominence, there is no “good” way to end this without having another omnipotent being fight it. It is what it is, but for me, it didn’t take away the pleasure of getting to know about these things and the way they affect humanity.
The book, at least in the beginning, is written in the form of vignettes – very disjointed, both in time and in characters, in a non-linear way. But it all start to make sense, sometimes loosely, as you keep on reading.
I’m not going to get into its origins in the SCP Foundation universe, or the various editions of the book. For now, all you need to know is, I enjoyed the heck out of reading it, and you should at least try it out, if you haven’t. In terms of originality of ideas, it’s one of the finest works of speculative fiction to have come out in this decade.