#REVIEW: There Is No Antimemetics Division, by QNTM

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I liked this book so much, I’m willing to forgive the author for wanting me to call him QNTM. I don’t know why, but I have a weird visceral reaction to authors using their Internet handles on their books. It’s made even weirder when you remember that “Luther Siler” is a pen name. I don’t know a single thing about QNTM other than that he wrote this book (and, I guess, that he’s a he, judging from his author picture) but if he’s going to keep writing books this good I’ll call him whatever the hell he wants.

This is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. I can imagine China Miéville writing something like it, which is not to say that Miéville has written anything like it yet. I’m not sure who or what else to compare it to. This is going to be a fairly short review, first because I don’t want to indulge in any spoilers, and second because beyond describing the premise, I’m really not sure how the hell to talk about this book. So I’m going to give you the basics, and I’m already telling you you need to read this if you’ve ever enjoyed science fiction that was smarter than you were, and that is going to have to be enough.

The main character of the book is Marie Quinn, who is in charge of the Antimemetics Division of something called the Unknown Organization. Her division is responsible for tracking, categorizing and occasionally keeping captive entities and objects that have the property of erasing themselves from memory. That’s what an antimeme is; it’s something that you view or interact with or occasionally get messily killed by and the very moment you’re not interacting with it you forget it exists. Some can erase specific kinds of memories (the book is generally not funny, but one entity that feeds on the very specific memory of knowing how to ride a bike has a fe pages dedicated to it) and some have the capability of also erasing notes, videos and recordings that reference their existence as well.

So, given that, and given that the potential threat these types of entities pose to civilization should be immediately clear, let me ask you two questions:

  1. How do you fight against these things, if you forget they exist the moment you turn away from them?
  2. How the hell do you write a book about fighting against something like that?

This is a short book; at under 300 pages it can be read in a day easily, and somehow, despite the complexity of the premise, it’s impressively clearly written. You would think this would be a mess to read, and in a lesser author’s hands, it would be; I certainly couldn’t have written this book. I almost read it twice in a row, and there’s a very good chance I’m going to read it again before the month is up. It’s an incredible achievement, both as a story and as a piece of craft. I know I’ve been super positive in my reviews lately (and I have read some amazing books in 2026) but once again I need to tell you that you absolutely have to read this one. Go grab it, right now, before you forget.

This was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews2 Comments

It’s rare that I pick up a Lego set specifically because I want to build it, and not necessarily because I want it on display, but I took a look at the soccer ball set that hit stores in time for the World Cup and then a conveniently timed double points weekend rolled around and my money disappeared. Because look at the inside of this thing:

That looks a lot more complicated than it was, surprisingly enough, and it was tremendously satisfying to put together. Then there’s the bit that goes in the middle:

If you press that little tan piece sitting right in front of the green, the players jump up and down and the fireworks swing from side to side. Then the whole thing can close up, and honestly, the ball looks pretty cool closed up, too:

We aren’t going to do the math on how much this cost vs. how many hours it took to put together or anything like that, we’re just going to say it was a fun way to spend an evening and an afternoon, leave it at that, and … sigh, figure out somewhere to put it.

Book review coming tomorrow; I’m waiting for the high to die down a little bit.

Not tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I got a bit over six and a half hours of sleep last night, woke up at 5:30, went back to bed at 9:30, and slept until 1:30. I currently feel like pan-roasted crap, it’s 7:30, and I think I’m going back to bed now.

Be nice.

On executive dysfunction

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics1 Comment

This novelty ruler has been in the wrong room in my house for months. Every time I have looked at it, for that entire time, it has annoyed me. Today, I picked it up, carried it through a hallway, my kitchen, my laundry room and the master bathroom and placed it right there, where it belongs, and where it will be used to make sure that all of my books are lined up perfectly.

Months. It took fifteen seconds to move and has annoyed me multiple times per day for months.

But now it is in the right place.

Also, because that wasn’t much of a post, sometimes I say things on more ephemeral websites that I don’t think are completely stupid. With that in mind, I offer you the following screenshot, and invite you to comment on its wisdom or lack thereof, either here or at the original source. I’ve talked about some of these ideas before, but some of them are newer, at least in terms of being expressed by me:

I will freely admit I have not done the math, which may need to be tweaked, but I do genuinely think something like this would work for more accurate, proportional representation. Am I dumb? Call me dumb!

#REVIEW: The Empire of the Vampire series, by Jay Kristoff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It should be illegal for one guy to be this good.

I have read three of Jay Kristoff’s books prior to this series. I read his Nevernight series back-to-back-to-back and it ended up being my favorite thing I read that year. When I finished reading Nevernight the Empire of the Vampire series was two books in, with the third yet unpublished. The third book, Empire of the Dawn, came out in November of 2025, at which point I bought all three of them, and … they sat on the shelf. Because I was a hundred miles behind on my reading, and all three of these books are 700+ pages, and despite how amazing Nevernight was, this series had a big disadvantage: It was about vampires.

I am so, so, so tired of vampires.

So anyway, I started Empire of the Vampire on July 6 and finished Empire of the Dawn this morning, July 15, so I read all 2200+ pages of this series in nine days.

It’s fucking amazing. It’s about vampires and it’s amazing. That shit shouldn’t even be possible.

Now, I’m not certain I’m willing to put this above Nevernight just yet. I really need to think about the ending for a while, and I thought about delaying this post for a few days while I worked through my feelings about it. Let me give a general idea why without getting too deep into spoilers: this book is mostly framed as one character telling his life story to someone who is holding him captive. Eventually a second character does some narration as well, and from time to time they break away from the narrative style to a more standard third-person omniscient perspective taking place in the “now” of the book. And it occurred to me partway through book one that we had no real reason to believe that everything he was telling us was true. And that, in fact, an unreliable narrator would fit in perfectly with what was going on in the story. This feeling got a bit stronger when the second character started telling her story and started it by calling the main character a fucking liar.

I don’t like vampires, and I don’t like unreliable narrators, and this book has vampires and unreliable narrators.

Because holy fuck are Gabriel de León and the second narrator massive Gotdamned liars. They are filthy liars. And I’m still not convinced that I like the way all of that worked out in the end.

That said:

  1. This series has the best swearing I’ve ever seen in print. The depth and breadth of the profanity used in Empire of the Vampire should be taught in college classrooms. It’s amazing. I am literally in awe.
  2. As a massive fan of world building, the basic setting of this world– a crumbling civilization where the fucking sun went out, more or less, twenty-six years ago– is absolutely fantastic. They call what happened to the sun the Daysdeath, and this is basically a world where you have night and dusk and it never gets any brighter than that– and that’s what has allowed the sheer number of vampires that exist in these books to exist, and also explains why the several vampire bloodlines have more or less been able to take over the world in the couple of decades since the Daysdeath happened.(*)
  3. Jay Kristoff also writes fantastic battle and large-scale warfare scenes, which he didn’t have a lot of opportunity to use in Nevernight.
  4. The characters and their various relationships are absolutely wonderful. The development you see in Gabriel over the course of the book is awesome, and his relationships with the other characters are constantly evolving, or at least pinioning back and forth between “trying to kill each other” and “not trying to kill each other.” There’s a character in Book One who is going to give you Draco Malfoy vibes; don’t stress, he’ll get better. Much better.
  5. There’s also a sentient, talking sword who is slowly losing her mind over the course of the book. Yes, her. The sword is a girl.
  6. Everyone speaks French for no reason that I can see other than that it usually doesn’t happen in fantasy novels and it adds some neat flavor.
  7. And the use of religion. My God, the use of religion. The religion of the Empire of the Vampire books is a twisted, alternate version of Catholicism, and I am not joking when I tell you that if Jay Kristoff wrote an 800-page sourcebook of the lore and religious practices of this world I would buy it in a second and have it read in a day. Imagine a Catholicism that came from a Jesus who picked up a sword and conquered the world before being betrayed and executed on the wheel. (It’s not literally Jesus; they just call him the Redeemer, but the religion is clearly and intentionally derived from Catholicism.)
  8. Now imagine, in a book that’s already about vampires, the Holy Grail being a major focus of the story.

It’s so so so so so so so fucking good, guys. All of it. And it’s brutal as hell, and it continues Kristoff’s fine tradition of never ever letting anything nice ever happen to his characters; his goal is to hurt them, and in hurting them, hurt you, and he’s amazingly fucking good at it.

Speaking of fucking, this is a vampire novel, so there’s a lot of that as well, and the most unrealistic thing about this series is that it begins with a fifteen-year-old boy who is incredibly enthusiastic about eating pussy. Seriously, the books cover about eighteen years of Gabriel de León’s life, and there is more cunnilingus in this series than all the other books I own put together, and I have everything Sarah J. Maas has ever written.

The second most unbelievable thing about this story is that, remember, de León is telling someone about all of this, so any time he gets laid, he’s supposed to be literally sitting in his little jail cell describing this shit to a vampire who is writing it all down verbatim in a big book. There are moments where he gets mocked for it, but it’s unavoidably a little ridiculous.

Kristoff is absolutely a top-tier talent, and the worst thing is that he hasn’t started releasing whatever he’s working on next– I’m caught up with his books, and one thing he’s definitely shown me is that he’s a huge fan of unexpected reveals and sudden gory deaths (and sudden resurrections– the book’s about vampires, after all) and massive plot twists and I cannot start his next series until it’s finished, because if I had to wait two years in between any of these books I would simply die. But he’s firmly among my favorite writers at this point, and you have to check this series out.

(*) This has had serious effects on wildlife and plant life, as you might expect, and the food chain is all busted to hell as well since agriculture has gotten massively more difficult. You know what you can grow without a whole lot of sunlight? Potatoes. Gabriel de León is so, so, so tired of potatoes, guys, although he remains a fan of vodka.

On the nature of reality

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.

I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.

So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.

The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.

(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)

No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if that was made up, we still have a large problem.

And then there’s the picture.

Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:

“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.

“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.

“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.

“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.

“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.

The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.

And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.

What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.

And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.

Rebathroomed!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

As you can see from the strip of unmudded, unpainted drywall and the conspicuous lack of a shower door, we’re not quite done– the shower door is running late and should be here later this week, and they’ll take care of that part of the wall and a couple of other very minor tasks at that time. But I’d say we’re 90% done, and we threw a shower curtain on a tension rod on there so that we can shower in 24 hours after everything finishes curing, and the new floor is completely done.

So, progress? I’ll take it. Now we just have to figure out how to tie everything together, because the existing towels and bathroom mats and art on the walls do not work nicely with the blue in the new shower surround. But hopefully this fucker won’t leak.

Can’t post again, reading again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, ReadingLeave a comment

Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.

I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.