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Of course, there is an Antimemetics Division, you’ve just forgotten about it… The thing that threw me initially about this book is I thought it was Antimimetics Division—mimesis as in mimicry—which was compounded by the Penguin UK edition having a deer on the cover, making me think of aliens imitating Earthly forms. (A four-eyed deer, at that. Which makes me wonder if there might be a rebus puzzle going on here. Four-eyed-deer? No idea.) But it’s memesis as in memory. Antimemetics are beings, ideas, forces, that devour, negate, or generally affect human memory. So the science-fictional question behind this book is, “How do you combat an entity whose existence you’ve likely already forgotten?”

The job of doing that—and it is a job, mostly made up of meetings, training updates and paperwork (“Paperwork saves lives”)—is the purview of the Antimemetics Division, part of the larger Unknown Organisation, which is not an organisation that’s unknown, but one that deals with Unknowns. As the head of the AD (as I’ll call it from now, to save my word-processor’s spellcheck facility from a meltdown), Marie Quinn, explains:

“When empiricism and the scientific method were first starting to take shape, we realised that there were phenomena in the world that actively defied reason. Violations, weirdnesses, defects… places, events, ideas…”

Or, as one of her co-workers says, on reading through the AD’s database of known Unknowns:

“They have to be jokes. That’s how most of them read. Like very bad, dark, frightening jokes.”

The first half of the book is, essentially, a collection of short stories or episodes in which the AD deals with a variety of often invisible, sometimes humanoid (so it’s mimesis as well as memesis) Unknowns—antimemes, infovores, memory-corrupting entities, you know the sort of thing. Despite having at their disposal a variety of technologies, including hi-tech containment units, a pharmacy full of mnestic drugs (for the enhancement and restoration of memory), advanced concepts (“ideatic space”, “consensus nominality”), rigorous training (you might think it’s your first day in the Division, but it’s possible you’ve just had the memory of an entire career there wiped out), and lots of paperwork, but what they’re dealing with, ultimately, defies reason, and requires a sort of practical knowhow (or unknow-how) to defeat, or at least contain. It also requires a certain amount of bottom-line “is it better to let one person die than risk the release of a dangerous entity on the entire human race?”-style thinking.

The protagonist throughout this first half is Marie Quinn, whose life is a constant battle with some entities, and an attempt to keep numerous plates spinning with regard to others. (She regularly reads trivia so as to keep a certain low-level memetic entity that’s attached itself to her from feeding on her more important memories).

In the second half, the book leaves the short story feel for a single narrative about a far more apocalyptic and world-threatening entity, and it’s this I found a little less engaging. What worked in the first half of the book—a lot of quick ideas, sharp narrative turns, a somewhat absurd level of humour, and a number of characters you meet only to witness their demise—worked less, for me, in the more sustained narrative of the second half. There, the quickfire plot-turns, for instance, left me unsure what was actually going on, and while that might accurately represent what it would be like to deal with a reality-warping incursion, it also lead to a certain disengagement from the narrative on my part.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, though, making the whole thing worthwhile. There might be touches of Lovecraft here—in particular “From Beyond”, with its idea that we’re surrounded by invisible entities that will turn on us as soon as they realise we’ve worked out how to see them—as well as Ligotti, for his sense of absurdist humour. qntm, though, doesn’t share Ligotti’s misanthropy or truly nihilistic (even joyfully-nihilistic) levels of despair. (And I can’t help feeling that a writer with a pseudonym like qntm is surely bound, at some point in a book, to use the phrase “non-trivial”—and he does.) This is a book that brings the can-do science fictional mindset to cosmic horror, even when it takes us into the sort of apocalyptic levels of threat to reality you find at the end of, say, Alan Moore’s Providence. As Marie Quinn says—and no Lovecraft protagonist ever said:

“I’m going to win this war… I’ll beat the universe.”

The loss of memory has a lot of potential for real human drama—no mention is made, as far as I recall, of the potential use of mnestic drugs to combat dementia—but this is a book of quickfire ideas and narrative brio, not so much character and poignancy. (There was some of that, but I felt it less because of the general idea-driven momentum of the book—plus the sense that I shouldn’t get too attached to anyone.)

Which makes me think that may be the solution to the cover’s rebus (which qntm refers to as a “braindeer” on his site): it’s a book to read for the ideas (four-eyed deer)…

Abraham Merritt is one of those writers I’ve long meant to read, and despite owning various paperback editions of his books, and making two attempts to get into The Ship of Ishtar, it’s only now I’ve finally read one—his first—The Moon Pool.

This began life as a short story, published in All-Story Weekly (22 June 1918), where it was popular enough for Merritt to write a longer sequel, “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” (in six instalments from 15 February 1919), and then incorporate the two into a single novel-length work. (Which, for some reason, was published in book form twice in 1919, first by Putnam, then by Liveright—apparently with some revisions to the latter, which included changing the villainous Prussian Von Hetzdorp to a villainous Russian, Marakinoff. Merritt apparently preferred the Putnam text, but I ended up reading the Liveright text.)

The book starts with its narrator, Dr Goodwin (“the foremost of American botanists”), meeting a well-respected colleague, Dr Throckmartin (or “Throck”), who’s evidently in the grip of “some searing shock of mangled rapture and horror”. Throck tells the tale of what happened to him in the ruins of Nan-Matal in the South Pacific: of a certain door that only opens by the light of the full moon, releasing a being of shining light which proceeded to carry off, one by one, everyone else in his expedition, including his young wife. Throck has vowed to return with the necessary resources to rescue them, but having told his tale is himself snatched away by this creature of scintillant moonlight before Goodwin’s very eyes. Goodwin, who has promised to take over the task should Throck be unable to, begins making plans. (This is the point at which the initial short story ended.)

Heading for Nan-Matal armed with, among other things, “a set of Becquerel ray condensers” (an early name for radiation, apparently), Goodwin assembles an odd cast of helpers, including a younger action-hero type in the Irish-American Larry O’Keefe (who’s sceptical of all of the supernatural except, apparently, banshees and leprechauns), the somewhat simple strongman Olaf Huldricksson, and the morally ambiguous (at first, anyway) Russian scientist Marakinoff. All manage to get through the moon-activated door to the chamber of the mysterious and deadly moon pool beyond, but are saved from becoming victims of the “Shining One” by a vision of a beautiful woman and her attendant human-sized frog-creature, who show them how to open a hidden door. Exiting the chamber, the band of adventurers find themselves in Muria (as in Lemuria), a subterranean land presided over by an ancient, advanced civilisation. Muria is ruled by the beautiful Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, and the stocky-but-strong Lugur, Voice of the Shining One. (In this world, all women are tall and beautiful—though only the blondes seem to attain positions of authority—and all men strong and stocky.)

There’s a healthy dose of Haggard’s She going on here, with O’Keefe as the equivalent of the young heroic Leo, Dr Goodwin as the professorial Holly, and Yolara to some extent as Ayesha. Yolara falls in love with O’Keefe, and while he’s beguiled in turn, he’s really smitten by the visionary woman who guided them by the moon pool, who turns out to be Lakla, Handmaiden of the Silent Ones. This isn’t, though, quite the Ayesha/Ustane set-up from She, as although Yolara has all the fatal allure and power of Ayesha, the morally pure and innocent Lakla is essentially her equal, only serving different—and older—gods. Yolara serves the rapacious Shining One, and when she hears of the upper world from which O’Keefe came, makes plans for her deity’s conquest of it. Lakla’s Silent Ones, on the other hand, are a trio of ancient beings who originally created the Shining One, and though they’ve now lost control of it, and are somewhat fearful of it, nevertheless oppose its hunger for destruction. There are, even, echoes of the scene where Leo steps with Ayesha into a magical flame, only here the flames are “shining coils of moon fire”, and the outcome somewhat different, though just as perilous.

Merritt brings two things to this (by then) standard-feeling adventure formula, to make The Moon Pool distinct from She. One is a much greater degree of fantasy than Haggard employed. Merritt’s subterranean Muria possesses super-weapons including rays that shiver things (and people) to fragments, gravity-destroying bombs, invisibility devices; there’s also frog-people, a landscape of fungi that instantly devour living flesh, and the weird Shining One itself (which I can’t help picturing like the many glittery energy-beings in the original Star Trek series).

The other thing Merritt brings to this essentially Haggardian lost world adventure—and also what damned him for the more serious SF crowd of the 1950s and early 1960s—is his prose. Although James Blish (among others) would go on to dismiss it as “windy and cliché-ridden”, I think Merritt’s writing shows a real poetry when he turns it on at the right moment:

“There was no sky—at least no sky such as we know—all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens—through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora, echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles.”

(And if this sounds somewhat psychedelic, it may well be. As Douglas A Anderson shows in his essential article fact-checking Merritt’s autobiography, there’s an interview in which Merritt claims to have taken peyote, saying it “results in a color reaction. I remember sitting on the grass and watching it change into a variety of colors. Out of that came geometric patterns. I had a consciousness throughout of music that blended with the colors.” Just the melange of music and colour to be found in the above-quoted example of his prose, then.)

I have to admit that not all of Merritt’s writing excited me to the same level. His non-American characters tend to suffer from a touch of the Van Helsings, not just talking in garbled cod-English, but doing it at great length, which implies the author was really enjoying it, but to me it was just readerly friction. (And O’Keefe, despite speaking English, descends into long, lyrical passages infused with Irish folklore and mythology, as though to so underline his archetypal Irishness that you can’t help feeling he must be compensating for something.)

Lovecraft was an admirer, writing in a letter to Robert H Barlow that Merritt “has a peculiar power of working up an atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread”. And there are a few pre-echoes of Lovecraft’s own stories here. Not only does The Moon Pool, like “The Call of Cthulhu”, centre around a ruin on an island in the South Pacific, but the Norwegian captain of a ship found drifting nearby—Huldricksson—recalls, for me, the Norwegian captain Johansen from Lovecraft’s tale, both of whom have survived an encounter with their story’s monster. (Which, made of moonlight as it seems to be, has a touch of “The Colour Out of Space” about it.) And then there’s the theme of the scientifically-created servitor that turns against its makers—the shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness, the Shining One here—though of course that could be read as just one more variant on the Frankenstein theme inherent in all science fiction. (Or the Morlock/Eloi relationship from The Time Machine.)

Merritt was a tremendously popular author in his day, even having a periodical (A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine) named after him (though only after his death, and only lasting five issues). He was taken up by early SF fans, perhaps to his later detriment as, when SF started getting serious about the science in its fiction, his was found to be lacking, and he had to wait for his re-identification as a fantasy writer for his works to start being republished in paperback. Now he’s settled into place as one of the deep-cut classics of the fantasy field (I read it in an edition with footnotes and an introduction, from the Wesleyan University Press), not quite at the level of Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, but somewhere, perhaps, in the Clark Ashton Smith zone. (CAS on Merritt: “Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.”)

Merritt is a clear Romantic—not just in his lush prose, vivid imagination and high adventure, but for his ultimate message that “Love is stronger than all things.” (Even though it doesn’t help Throck, nor Huldricksson.) Although I enjoyed The Moon Pool well enough, the characters and situations were perhaps too archetypal, even clichéd, to really make it work for me. The descriptive prose is definitely good, though, as are the moments of bizarre fantasy. His subsequent output seems to be divided between further lost world adventures and a few occult thrillers. Perhaps if I read some more Merritt, I’ll go for one of the latter.

Instead of the gloomy, neon-lit Tokyo-esque setting of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan’s 1991 cyberpunk Synners is set in sunny LA, and overall feels less noir-ish than Gibson’s novel. Both use a hard-boiled style, though: dense, slangy, throwing you into the midst of the action and leaving you to work out what sort of world this is, who these people are, and what’s going on, as the action unfolds. (I sometimes wonder if SF’s aversion to info-dumps goes a little too far. It was a while before the characters were anything but names… and too many of them short ones beginning with ‘G’! I’m not asking for a full, formal introduction, just something to hook onto.)

The focus of Synners is the world of commercial video production in the near future, where talented individuals don “hotsuits” and electronic headgear to create something that’s halfway between a film and a lived experience, whether as a music video, advertising or immersive game-movies where you take part in the action. Small video-production company EyeTraxx has just been taken over by the mega-corporation Diversifications—not for its talent, but for a patent it quietly took out on a new way of producing and interfacing with video: sockets grown directly into the brain. Creators with sockets can effortlessly create much more vivid experiences, and those who plug directly into these new videos get a much more vivid a kick. One such creator, known to the world as Visual Mark, something of a drug burnout as well as being a highly talented artist, finds that using sockets is a medium he’s been waiting for all his life (which reminds me of a quote from one of Gibson’s early stories, about “how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in”).

Visual Mark gets his sockets just in time. Suddenly aware that direct neural access to the net (or the dataline as it’s most often called in this novel) makes it as much a part of his brainspace as his former limited grey matter, he expands into the digital world, just as his much-abused, over-toxed body gives out with a stroke: which itself enters the net as a separate, malicious and virus-like entity with an intent of its own.

For a novel published 35 years ago, there’s a lot that still feels like valid science fiction here. (Perhaps only the same things that Gibson and other early cyberpunk writers missed out on, such as a lack of mobile phones or wi-fi, date it.) Cadigan herself admitted, in a 2016 interview in Locus, that “there’s actually not as much science fiction in it as there used to be”, but there certainly is still relevance. Direct “neural interface equipment” is (I assume) a good way off, as is the use of brain implants as “an accepted treatment for certain depressives”. But such a phrase as “Better business through chemistry”—i.e., drug use—and a belief in what sounds like the much-touted singularity are, certainly, live ideas now, at least among the sort of tech elites who take cyberpunk novels not as warnings but how-to manuals:

“Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You’d only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t know the difference.”

The dark side of that—the neglect of the real world at the expense of the much-hyped digital one—gets acknowledgement here (it’s post-quake LA, but this could well be taken as a general statement):

“Whole portions of the physical world had yet to be reclaimed from the unusable, unliveable state that negligence and malevolence had consigned them to…”

Faced with the question of whether socket tech should be unleashed on the world, a senator from Michigan comments:

“Funny idea, isn’t it, putting something aside until you’re moral enough to use it.”

Which makes a valid point, I suppose—you’ll only develop the necessary moral maturity if you actually use the technology in question, by which point you’ll already be causing damage. (Apart from the obvious other answer: read more SF.)

Synners doesn’t feel, to me, as much on the raw edge of the cyberpunk aesthetic as Gibson’s earlier novel—though its future is closer to a realistic prediction than his (vat-grown ninjas are still a long way off). But the story has less of Gibson’s noir-ish feel and comes across more as a techno-thriller, with a clearer division between the good (the creatives, the hackers) and the bad (the controlling corporate types). All have that hard-boiled, life-worn, cynical edge to them, but the good guys don’t have as much of that deep-down compromised feel you get in the deeper shades of noir.

One thing the cyberpunks got right: as one of the characters here says, “We’ve become denizens of the net. Homo datum.” To which another adds, “Synners” (a foreshortening of “synthesisers”). Later, someone comments that “Every technology has its original sin”, implying we’re all original-synners now, fallen from the Eden of the real world into a mash-up of the digital and the real. Especially now, even early cyberpunk feels like something to revisit, just to check if there are any other prescient warnings we might do well to be reminded of.