XX: A Novel, Graphic

Description

Wrapping stories within stories, Rian Hughes' XX unleashes the full narrative potential of graphic design. It uses the visual culture of the twenty-first century to ask us who we think we are - and where we may be headed next. At Jodrell Bank Observatory a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin has been detected. Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert and on the autistic spectrum, thinks he can decode it. But when he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia find a way to step into the alien realm the signal encodes, they discover that it's already occupied - by ghostly entities that may come from our own past. Have these 'DMEn' (Digital Memetic Entities) been created by persons unknown for just such an eventuality? Are they our first line of defence in a coming war, not for territory, but for our minds? Including transcripts from NASA debriefs, newspaper and magazine articles, fictitious Wikipedia pages, a seventeenth-century treatise called Cometographia by Johannis Hevelius, and a spread on the so far undeciphered written language of Easter Island, Rongorongo, from a book called Language Lost: Undeciphered Scripts of the Ancient World. There is no book quite like this. The battle for your mind has already begun.

Rian Hughes is an award-winning graphic designer illustrator, comic artist, writer and typographer who has worked extensively for the British and American advertising, music and comic book industries. He has written and drawn comics for 2000AD and Batman: Black and White, and designed logos for James Bond, The X-Men, Superman, Hedkandi and The Avengers.

Vastly ambitious, XX is the most astonishing blend of narrative, meta-narratives and visuals. Real 'wow' moments and big ideas combine with brilliant typographical flourishes to create the Moby Dick of sci-fi. * Daily Mail * Genuinely unlike anything else I have ever read . . . The confidence and style with which Hughes juggles all his material is only matched by his extraordinary imagination and vision, and as the book races towards a mindboggling climax it leads the reader to some remarkable ideas about the nature of life, the universe and everything. Simply stunning. * Big Issue * XX keeps you turning the pages, engages with big ideas and delivers an authentic jolt of awe as it takes its galaxy-spanning conceit to the limit, and then some. * Financial Times * The look is every bit as vital as its plot and its prose. Compulsively readable. Its ideas are grand, and it moves like a thriller. Come for the lush design, stay for the Clarkeian ideas and sly sense of humour. * SFX * Rian Hughes' stunning visual spectacle of a novel . . . this staggering book! * SciFi Now * Brilliant, exciting, absorbing, and mind-blowing . . . It's one of those towering achievements we keep hearing about. XX is truly modernist in every way. Whatever Goethe's Faust was, whatever Melville's Moby Dick was, whatever Joyce's Ulysses or Kubrick's 2001 was, XX is its latest expression - a perfect work of art about what it means to be human in a world of gigantic ideas. -- Grant Morrison This is a book which only Rian Hughes could have created, which should make us all eternally grateful that he did. -- Kieron Gillen A novel that is novel is so many ways. A brilliant co-mix of text and graphic design in which sign, symbol and word are linguistically intertwined and reinvented. -- Steven Heller Rian Hughes is a luminescent pop culture demon. -- David Quantick