Let's talk about the
I for a moment.
Not the letter, but the concept.
The self.
Consciousness, sapience, the awareness of one's own existence.
What is it that makes me, me? You, you? Is it simply being aware that you exist, that you are thinking, that you have the proof of your own identity? As Descartes put it, "
Cogito, ergo sum"?
Or is it something more than that?
Descartes himself worked within a somewhat more nuanced framework than simply that brief statement; there is more to it than just that one thinks. Rather, Descarte's philosophical construct was based on a more thorough question, the question of what we can be sure exists. He begins by doubting everything. The one thing he can be sure of, at that point, is that he is, in fact, doubting. Even if he assumes that all other things are a deception, logically, he must exist in order to be deceived, must be able to interpret and consider the deception, to doubt or believe if he wishes.
You doubt, therefore you are thinking. You are thinking, therefore you know yourself to exist, because you cannot be deceived about that, even if everything else is nonexistent.
So, what does that mean about the self, if everything else can be doubted? If every bit of input we receive can be disbelieved?
It means, for one, that the self isn't necessarily dependent on its vessel to be defined.
Let's expand outward, now. Our conception of I, our definition of ourselves, is more nuanced than simply existing, after all. We are more than just that one thought. We consider our bodies to be part of ourselves, for example. All of the beliefs we carry, all of the knowledge, all of the lived experiences that form our memories and skills, those are part of the self, as well. Are those part of the I?
Your heart beats on its own. You can't consciously control it. Would you want to? Having to think, dozens of times per minute, thousands of times per day, whether awake or asleep, 'OK, ventricles, it's time to contract now. OK, now you can relax. OK, time to contract again.' But if it runs on automatic, if you can't control it, is it part of the self?
...is the body part of the self at all?
Knowing that one exists is fine, of course, but you can't define yourself against yourself. If the self is all that exists, then how can you see the self?
Instead, we define ourselves by drawing a line, between the
I and the
not I. You know what you aren't; the dividing line between the things that you are and the things that you aren't becomes the barrier that protects you from
dissolution. We proclaim our existence by shouting "
I am" at the blinding, deafening volume of sensory and semiotic input that makes up our world.
As humans, that dividing line can be seen as coterminous with the shape of our bodies. We extend our influence outward from there, into the great not I, through hands, tools, voices, words. A skilled carpenter's tools are like extensions of their body; the carpenter knows where the tools are, what they can do, how they can influence the shape of the materials being used for the project.
Where does the project come from, though? Where did the plans for the house come from, originally?
Before the carpenter starts work, an architect must design the house. But where did the architect get the design?
Before the nail can be driven into the board, the hammer must be in the carpenter's hand. But where did the hammer come from?
Where, in the time before hammers, did the thought, '
Og tie rock to stick, make hit things strong' come from?
Let's take a little different view, then. What if we define the
I as the sum of the experiences, lessons, and beliefs that create us? It becomes, then, a bundle of
ideas. A self-aware idea, perhaps. An idea, set aside from the whole like an
oxbow lake, able to define itself by its separation from the sea of ideas that pass by.
An idea that, itself, births new ideas. Fleeting thoughts, which may or may not be set free. The earliest ideas may have been simple by modern standards, but even so, they were ideas that we still use. That rock rolls down the hill when you toss it. What if you put things on the rolling rocks? What if you used the rolling rocks to help you move things? What if you made better-rounded rolling things? Perfect circles, even?
That water pushes things when you stand in it. What if you put a rolling thing partway in the water and attached it to something else, so that the water pushes it but it can't be moved from its spot?
Age-old ideas, still in use today.
The first ideas had to be self-evident. 'Og is Og. Thog is not Og.' Once you're past that, you can start exploring your environment. 'Rock is hard. Stick is long. Other rock is hard. First rock harder than other rock, break other rock, make other rock sharp. Sharp rock good at cutting things.' You could watch someone demonstrate these things, remember them, show other people. But the spread of ideas was limited. You had to be right up close, able to watch. If it was dark, you couldn't trade ideas at all. There was something else important that needed to exist.
Language.
The earliest languages made ideas
mobile. No longer did ideas have to remain as what could be physically shown, but instead they could be transmitted, by voice, to more people at once. And from there, more complex thought, more complex ideas could be crafted. It was possible to explain that 'Scary stripey death cat' had to be approached differently than 'Big stompy nosey thing' without needing either of those things present. Even without words as we might understand them, the
symbols can be deciphered.
With language and the ability for more complex ideas, more complex questions started to arise. Why does the hot sky glowy thing move? Where does it go when it disappears below the horizon, before it reappears on the other side? What is the cold sky glowy thing that changes shape and doesn't keep the same time?
Why does it get hot some times of year and cold others?
Where did all of this come from, anyways?
Before we had the tools to examine the world, the systems of thought to allow us to find the explanations, there were stories.
Enki brought water to the land of Dilmun, allowing plants to flourish and life to take hold.
The sun is pushed across the sky by the dung-beetle god,
Khepri.
When we seek answers, in the absence of available explanations, we shape ideas into myths, pantheons, gods.
When we seek entertainment, stories can provide that, too. When we have a shared basis of stories, we can form a culture.
When we have a culture, we can do great things. Vast constructions, shaping the land to our needs, if our culture values such things. Writing develops, perhaps first as a tool for commerce, but then as a way to record our stories and lessons, so they can be transported from place to place, without the writer having to travel with them. And in this way, they can survive even beyond the death of an entire culture.
The ideas, then, can outlive their creators, can spread using minds as incubators and vectors, can shape even those minds, as they pass through them.
Writing also introduces a complication, however. An idea, once written down, is largely immutable. This copy of Descartes'
Principia Philosophiæ may be differently translated, but the contents will still be the same as any other copy. It's only when those ideas come in contact with other ideas, within the seedbed of a thinking individual, that new ideas, syntheses, can be formed. And those are then written down, passed on, built upon further, and the cycle continues.
Ideas themselves promote this. The idea for language came from the need to communicate ideas. The idea for written language came from the need to communicate ideas over longer distances. The idea for printing came from the need to communicate ideas to more people, more efficiently. The idea for telecommunications came from the need to communicate ideas across longer distances, faster.
The idea for the Internet came from the need to communicate more ideas across potentially global distances as close to instantly as possible.
With the internet, though, the medium is no longer immutable. Ideas can be expressed that change themselves over time, that reshape themselves based on new data. Wikipedia lurches forward, an up-to-the-minute encyclopedia written by a million authors, changing to become more accurate and better-researched through this wide distribution.
When we combine so many ideas in an effectively limitless space and give them the ability to shape themselves, though, it raises an important question: how dense can ideas become, before they start to actually think?
OK, so after all of that, where am I actually going with all this? It's a long introduction, but it's the basic underpinnings of
XX, by Rian Hughes. This is... a doozy of a book. 992 pages in total, not even bothering to keep to the normal format of a book. The inside of the dust jacket is made to look like a small shelf of books, which are then excerpted within the text (some real, some not), while the endpapers of the book feature a selection of covers from various printings of
Ascension by F. Herschel Teague, a made-up 1960s sci-fi novel from a made-up author, but which is included in its entirety, in its 'serialized original printing,' within the text of
XX. The book's actual content begins literally as soon as you turn the endpaper, a stream of 1s and 0s, a binary data stream, taking form across a few pages before leading into exactly what those 1s and 0s represent, a brief discussion by a few British astronomers of just what they're supposed to do with this stream... because it's a very clear, and very obvious
radio signal from deep space, clearly the work of intelligent beings.
That link, just there? That page is directly referenced in the book, in this first set of pages. Quoted directly. That's not something Hughes made up, that's real.
It's only after this first chapter finishes that we get what would normally be expected in a book, the
colophon and the title page. This is followed by a brief poem about the origin and nature of ideas, then the novel proper. The main character is Jack Fenwick, a probably-autistic (he himself considers this in-text) AI programmer at a small tech startup in London. He's one of those folks who is
very good at
noticing patterns in the visual noise that surrounds us, perhaps to the point of obsession. This tendency of his, to find patterns, means that when the astronomers at
Jodrell Bank who picked up the "Signal from Space" need help figuring out a way to coax meaning out of it, they go to Jack, who (helpfully) set up some of the software their systems are running on.
As he's just starting to dig in, though, the Signal gets leaked onto the internet. This democratization of the attempts to find a way to sort through it results in a vast array of multimedia explorations that are examined in the book, from dropping the Signal into a generative graphics program and letting it draw patterns on its own, to making music from it (complete with actual LP available to download; there's a QR code in the book that leads there). While all this is going on, though, Jack comes to the conclusion, based on looking at repeating fragments of the Signal's code, that it's not a message from aliens, but instead is the aliens, transmitted digitally.
With this idea in place, that the Signal is itself carrying alien minds in it, combined with the Signal being out on the Internet, where the idea farm is percolating away, he comes up with the idea for the Oxbow, a digital device a little like a one-way valve, where a mind in the Internet could slip in, and still see out, but be separated from the whole, able to see the I and the not I. This is then hooked up to a 3D printer (for visual representation) and a text output engine (for communication), turned on, and he and his two coworkers, Nixon (the money and business sense) and Harriet (a master programmer), sit back to see what happens. What they get is decidedly not what they expect, though, as instead of grabbing an alien, they get the Twentieth Century incarnate, the titular XX.
Shouty machine head (whose preferred appearance is as a dazzle-striped mechanical monstrosity seemingly inspired by the factory set design in
Metropolis crossed with WWII battleships) is quickly joined by The 19th Count (a tall, thin Victorian gentleman in pure alabaster white, both clothing and skin, with absolutely no other coloration anywhere, whose speech comes in the style of
vintage playbills) and Girl 21 (a manga-influenced goth girl who uses a constantly-changing flipshow of selfies and animated .gif images to show facial expression, who talks by tweeting with a smartphone), avatars of their respective centuries. These three characters, only visible in their avatars through
Augmented Reality glasses hooked to the Oxbow software, serve as secondary protagonists, allowing ideas to be bounced off of them as Jack, Harriet, and Nixon explore what lurks within the Signal in an attempt to discover what it actually is, how it works, and what its inner meaning is.
At the same time, a second plot dealing with Dana Normansson, an astronaut working at
Daedalus Base on the far side of the Moon, is running, dealing with an object that flew in from outside the solar system at a significant fraction of the speed of light, pierced through
Europa entirely, whipped around the sun, and promptly embedded itself in the Moon's surface. Venturing out to investigate, she finds that what turns out to have been a ship has fired an escape pod, and a single alien has survived, though injured. Her plotline, at least at first, deals with trying to work out how to communicate with a being who, while intelligent, shares few sensory inputs and no language with humans.
There's obviously several layers of narrative working on top of each other here, several plots that initially seem divergent-if-parallel, but eventually come together. There's a few plot holes here and there, one of which bugged me upon noticing it about 20 pages later and one of which I didn't really realize until after finishing the book but then it kind of lingers like an unanswered question but which may be somewhat by design. Most of the concepts at work are well-explained before they actually come up in the narrative, through the many "ephemera" that are included in the hefty page count, along with showing the effects of the Signal on culture as a whole.
Rian Hughes is a published author, but this was his first novel; his earlier works are all nonfiction on the topic of graphic design, and he himself is a graphic designer with a wide array of fonts, a portfolio full of book and album packaging, and a number of comic book title designs to his name. This history shows very clearly; every page of XX is carefully designed, so that it looks as much like the source he's attempting to emulate on each page as possible. He uses type as an artistic medium, stretching it to its absolute limits and using words to form images even while using that same text to tell the story. The only places that tend to be difficult to read are when XX is talking; the typeface chosen for its normal speech takes a little extra work, though not usually for pages upon pages after its initial, 18-page soliloquy about itself, but it is given two other typefaces later that are also difficult. But then, it would be rather difficult to talk to an anthropomorphized incarnation of the spirit of automation in any way that isn't 'loud and clanky'.
I came into this expecting something in the same vein as
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel. There, as here, an author with no previous fiction to their name dropped a massive experimental piece on the market, a tome that, for someone willing to put in the time and effort, is a very rewarding experience.
(Full disclosure, I have never actually gotten all the way through House of Leaves, to my shame. In my defense, it is a very tough read. Maybe I'll actually properly tackle it this year.) This book isn't quite as unapproachable as Danielewski's, but definitely operates in the same space. Where Danielewski's work was very much engaging with the 20th century media landscape and ability to spread ideas,
XX is absolutely at home in the 21st century, titular character notwithstanding. Wikipedia, Twitter, and even online meme culture make appearances, and while I perhaps felt that the primary narrative was a little rushed at the end, the author's stated desire to keep it under 1000 pages meant that had to happen, especially given the coda at the end, after the epilogue, where the whole piece is brought full-circle in an amazing bit of speculative science fiction that ties everything off in a downright brilliant manner.
Yes, there's an epilogue, then there's an additional 60 pages of story.
