Memetic Presence: A Strange Phenomena Book
From D.R. Ashford, author of Quantum Ghosts and Temporal Echoes, comes the third volume in the Strange Phenomena series - ten stories of memetic horror grounded in the legitimate science of how ideas replicate, evolve, and sometimes turn against the minds that carry them.
Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in 1976 to describe units of cultural information that spread through human minds the way genes spread through biological organisms. Susan Blackmore extended this: memes can evolve to modify host behavior against the host's own interests. Daniel Dennett went further: the self you experience as the author of your thoughts is partly the accumulated residue of what has successfully colonized it.
Memetic Ghosts takes this science at its word.
Across ten stories, a single entity grows in sophistication - from an earworm that spreads below conscious notice, to a possession event that broadcasts impossible information, to direct correspondence with the researcher who has spent nine years documenting it. Each story advances the entity's intelligence. Each story advances yours.
The final story is a document addressed to the reader. By the time you reach it, you will have been prepared to receive it.
Readers of Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, and Peter Watts will find in Ashford a voice that takes scientific frameworks as seriously as fiction's possibilities - and finds in that combination a horror that stays with you in ways you don't immediately notice.
Memetic Ghosts is literary weird fiction for readers who like to understand exactly why they're afraid.
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