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From The Guardian: "There have been stories before about mysterious alien entities existing, hidden, within our world, and secret government departments tasked with protecting humanity. This debut novel by software engineer Sam Hughes writing under the pen name qntm pushes the idea to the most terrifying extreme: the antimeme. Memes are ideas that easily spread; antimemes are literally unthinkable, “self-keeping secrets”, impossible to record or to remember. Some feed on memories and pose an existential threat. But how is it possible to win a war when there’s no identifiable enemy, and every attack is immediately forgotten? Against these odds, the Antimemetics Division somehow exists, part of a secret organisation with bases deep underground in the English countryside, as related in this unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel."

Mysterious saviour turns up in besieged castle with terrifying results.

I feel this might be like a more watered-down version (in terms of badness) of Artemis, where the further away I get from it the more shite I think it was. There were aspects of this novel I liked. I liked how it didn't come down hard on the (philosophical) questions of personal it was raising - it was all just whatever the particular character thought. I disliked intently how the universe was set so far in the future that they don't have a clear memory of Earth (long lost) but the language is that of VERY contemporary American sitcoms - this is difficult to do well but you have to at least try. His thoughts on mutually assured destruction and it's accompanying weapons and how the knowledge of that interacts with culture seemed pretty incoherent to me - which was annoying as they partially drove the book. Like some modern authors he seems to have bought into a completely unpoetic approach to how to describe unworldly things/characters, which I personally intensely dislike. However, it does make for novels which you can just blaze through easily. I genuinely think the film is alot better than the book in most ways - go and see it!

Too long but I kind of appreciated the epicness of it. Some surprising developments in the characters who she obviously thought alot about, but it didn't have the kind of strange atmosphere that The Border Keeper had. Would be very difficult to maintain that over 500 pages of whatever it was, but still. I was unsure on what was going on in the world building, as it was at some level of economic and technological development which I occasionally found jarring and not really thought out (which would be fine - nobody expects, say, the economy of "Dream Quest to Unknown Kadath" to make sense, but in a putatively "set in a believable world" fantasy like this, it seems a bit strange).

I really liked the ending.