That's a terrible pun - sorry - do you get it? Yes? I'm not suggesting than Rian Hughes' novel, XX, is anything like the literary equivalent of a Prog Rock album, honest. It is conceptual, though. If Hughes is a musician, he's more like...Karlheinz Stockhausen? Possibly.
This fat novel, bereft of its cover, sat beside my bed for a few weeks, looking every bit like the monolith. Well, apart from being a lot fatter (see bottom photo). And like the apes in Kubrick's film, I metaphorically danced around it, screeching, unable to fathom what it really meant. There's an alien on the moon. There's The Grid, The Signal and a tech nerd trying to fathom it all out, with the aid of special goggles. In Hoxton, London. It's science-fiction.
I read a lot of sci-fi as a kid, then some more as an adult and intermittently ever since. From that history, I think XX is part Arthur C Clarke (of course), part Olaf Stapledon (cosmic travelling), a bit William Gibson...and that's about as many references as I can muster.
The real fun is in the design. No surprise since Hughes is a graphic designer. Aside from a quick flick I let the typographical adventures come at me as I read. Retrospectively, I think that was a wise choice, not knowing what was coming next. These aren't examples of a designer playing for the sake of it but utilising his skills and imagination to integrate the visual effects into the story. So, if any book can be said to involve the reader in the experience through means other than what's written, this is it.
As for what's written, I don't know how much of the science is fact and how much is fiction. And yes, the technical stuff did leave me far behind. In that sense, XX is much like the so-called 'hard-science' sci-fi genre. The real pleasure for me, design aspects aside, came from the 'realities' wrapped around the tale, such as media reports and debates surrounding the treatment of aliens. Should we be wary, even hostile? Or would that be cruel and prejudiced?
This 'externalised idea storage device' (see p 159) or 'book', as their commonly known, is partly about the transmission and possibly contagious nature of ideas. It's about big and perhaps even small ideas infiltrating minds and as such contains a semi-political subtext which could have been expanded upon, but Hughes obviously didn't want to write a political sci-fi novel. We know big ideas can be very dangerous in the wrong heads. That's if the ideas are bad to start with. And a 'bad' political idea is, of course, a subjective interpretation.
Hughes packs this book with ideas in both narrative and visual form. It's a mind-blowing 'trip', you might say. It's the book as event and, ironically, considering how much content is borne out of the digital age, one that works best as old-fashioned print on paper.
Rian Hughes interview here
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