XX

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.

His illustrations have appeared in magazines in the UK, UK and Japan, and a retrospective monograph collecting his work, Art, Commercial, was published in 2001.

His books include I Am A Number, Cult-ure: Ideas Can Be Dangerous, Logo a Gogo and Lifestyle Illustration of the '50s. His comic strips have been collected in Yesterday's Tomorrows and Tales from Beyond Science, and his burlesque portraits in Soho Dives, Soho Divas.

'Extraordinary stuff . . . There are ideas larger and more mind-bending, I think, than those I have come across in any other sci-fi novel.' - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

At Jodrell Bank a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin has been detected. Artificial intelligence expert Jack Fenwick thinks he can decode it. But when he and his associates at Hoxton 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?

XX presents a compelling vision of humanity's unique place in the universe, and of what might happen in the wake of the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

As compelling as it is visually striking, Rian Hughes' first novel incorporates NASA transcripts, newspaper and magazine articles, fictitious Wikipedia pages, undeciphered alphabets, and 'Ascension', a forgotten novelette by 1960s counterculture guru Herschel Teague that mysteriously foreshadows events.

Wrapping stories within stories, Rian Hughes' XX unleashes the full narrative potential of graphic design. Drawing on Dada, punk and the modernist movements of the twentieth century, it asks us who we think we are - and where we may be headed next.

The battle for your mind has already begun.