Novels originally published on blogs which went on to become bestsellers when picked up by a traditional imprint are not new – The Martian (2011, USA), Wool (2011, USA), Fifty Shades of Gray (2011, UK), for example. Novels which originally appeared on AO3 have also picked up contracts from traditional publishers. To these routes we can now add the SCP Foundation, a collective writing project in which contributors post stories based within the SCP Foundation’s universe. Think X-Files meets Lovecraft meets Copypasta meets Resident Evil. Sort of.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025, UK) is a reformatted collection of stories originally published on the SCP Foundation website by Sam Hughes, given a story arc as a loose framing narrative, and expanded to novel-length with an original novella. It works. Sort of. It’s a fix-up and the joins are not difficult to spot. The universe is a collaborative project, although I believe the “antimemetic” aspect is original to qntm.

In the universe of the SCP Foundation, the world is under constant threat by paranormal and supernatural phenomena. A secret organisation exists in order to combat these threats. It’s called the Unknown Organisation, UO. (While the UO is international, the novel is set entirely within the UK.) The idea has been around for years. There was a RPG called Delta Green based on the same premise back in the 1990s. The X-Files covered similar ground in some episodes.

Where There is No Antimemetics Division differs is that the threats the titular division combats are entirely idea-based. They’re memes. Even then, we’ve been there before – I remember similar ideas in some of the New Who series. It’s a neat central premise. It’s partly presented as case-files, which is a somewhat obvious spin on the material, but is also a quick and effective way to world-build. Unfortunately, there’s not much drama or jeopardy in, well, bad ideas. So There is No Antimemetics Division turns the various memetic “unknowns” into mechanisms to generate horror tropes. Especially in the final section of the novel, in which a much-feared Unknown has escaped from idea-space and is turning the real world into some sort of post-apocalyptic zombified wasteland.

To add verisimilitude to the narrative parts of it are redacted. But it’s often easy to figure out the redacted words and they’re… banal. “And”. “Was”. Words that would not normally be redacted because they’re not informative or revealing. If it’s a gimmick, it didn’t work for me.

There’s probably something ironic in the fact some of the ideas in There is No Antimemetic Division just bounced off me, while others were a little too familiar. I also felt some of the ideas lacked rigour, and the UO and its capabilities, and the technology behind it, appeared to change from page to page. Eventually, the whole edifice slowly collapsed under the weight of its own premise. A neat idea, perhaps, that overstayed its welcome at novel-length and probably worked best in its original incarnation, a wiki of short stories. For me, the novel never really recovered from asking me to swallow an invisible cryptozoic creature that was 1000 metres tall and able to walk on water using its wide padded feet…