It’s a measure of my limitations that I can’t remember the title (or author) of both the most important fictions I’ve read since the year started; the two books that have made the deepest impression on me. The novel I’ve just finished is by qntm (an internet presence) called There Is No Anti Memetics Division, and the other was recommended by Mick Herron, who writes the Slough House spy novels, in an interview I believe I read last year.
I bought and began reading this second novel which, among other things, examined the boundaries between human and non-human workers, and stopped because it was derailing thoughts I was pursuing in parallel with these ideas. It was brilliant.
Both books were brilliant. Borrow them or buy them.
In conjunction with these, I began listening to Roger Penrose, the philosopher and his ideas about consciousness and the philosophical thoughts around idealism (which are very different to our regular everyday thoughts about idealism.)
The primacy of consciousness over materialism (is how I understand it) and how this/these might interact with my political interests (which are essentially Marxian.) I believe I understood some of it. Other parts, I skimmed across.
At the same time, Starmer’s Labour continued to unravel exponentially and become a corresponding incongruity. Their representatives increasingly reminded me of porridge gone cold. Abandoned. Congealing in a room that no one enters. A room that no one will ever enter.
I had already dismissed them because of their complicity in Gaza, but the ongoing infolding of their collective identities (into this whey grotesquerie) began to feel unearthly, as though their dead and deadening eyes held an external truth, a truth that mattered beyond their blank and venal self-interest. They were become flat abstractions.
I began to feel they (New Labour) were rather less than human, incapable of escaping their designations as exemplifiers of a world in which they had no emotional interest, involvement, or physical agency. They reminded me of both Mick Herron’s employees, and qntm’s mind cannibals.
Within this mash-up came the Gorton and Denton by-election.
I was born and raised in Hyde, immediately across the River Tame from Denton.
It used to be the second most polluted river in Europe. My family, on my father’s side, going back to the early 19th century, were hatters and textile workers, sometimes living and frequently working in Denton. There was a connection. His grandfather, Garibaldi, was driven mad by the mercury used in hatting.
I have engaged, of an evening on discussion sites, with Reform supporters, many of whom are AI generated with no existence beyond an algorithm responding to my arguments and provocations. Many of them have numbers instead of names. Their unexistence isn’t hidden.
And somehow, all these strands have come together in this twisted thread of illogic.
To quote directly from qntm’s great novel (which gave me nightmares):
‘Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition. Beneath it, within its context, everything becomes corrupted into the worst version of itself. It takes joy and turns it into vindictive glee; it takes self-reliance and turns it into solipsistic psychosis; it turns love into smothering assault, pride into humiliation, families into traps, safety into paranoia, peace into discontent. It turns people into people who do not see people as people. And civilisations, ultimately, into abominations.’
As spring approaches, if birdsong were battery operated, would it be less beautiful (or even beautiful at all.)
The two books –
There Is No AntiMimetics Division by qntm
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn (although I can find no record of Mick Herron recommending this)
Steven Taylor
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