XX

I first must thank my partner for buying me this book for the holidays. I'd barely heard of it, but it looked very much my style.

I've, um, read a couple of bricks in my time, and few of them have read as smoothly and funly as XX. Any fan of golden age sci fi will love this one. I'm honestly surprised I'm not seeing more people talk about it.

I can look at this book more favourably If I view it as an experiment. If you ripped a few pages out of Contact, a good chunk out of a couple astronomy text books, some coffee table graphic/history of fonts books, some history of language/communication books and a philosophy text book to top it off and buzzed them in a blender, you'd get the general vibe.  A discussion about the virality of ideas is paramount in this SCIENCE fiction work. 

It gives decent coverage to how powerful, ideas, good or bad, can be, how people can have powerful and opposite reactions to new concepts. Also attempts to address the complicated history surrounding xenophobia, how people might view potential ‘aliens': those who want not to see negative othering/immigrant experience perpetuated in humanity ‘s history repeated in the cosmos vs. those who will automatically be bellicose/defensive at the potential for extra terrestrial visitors.

I loved the premise of multitudinous multimedia included as well as the manipulation of font (size, type, formatting, orientation on the page) as an aid to telling the story, and I think for the most part it didn't feel extraneous, rather the book was a little repetitive in plot beats, and therefore, not just the special aspects, but the plain narrative began to drag. Still, grateful it wasn't divided into a duology, because waiting for that ending would have been worse.

The two teams, Jodrell Bank and Intelligencia, working the problem in the earlier part of that book, along with the digital personification of past centuries as a sampling of the Internet's defence against alien ideas were the winning moments for me.

I did appreciate some of the side tangents into symbolism, meaning, communication, exactly how staggeringly difficult it would be to attempt to initiate conversation with a being that has absolutely nothing in common with any humans, no cultural or linguistic basis.

I fear this book wanted to make a heavy handed point about ideology, (propaganda, how ideas spread, science vs religion, science vs social justice) but then distracted itself, not only with an idea about how to make humanity's/ other intelligences' memories/ contributions immortal, but also what appear to be well-researched/ thought out explorations into how science might grapple with certain eventualities, really putting the science in science fiction in a way I wasn't fully equipped to assess as plausible, or fully interested in seeing the nuts and bolts of laid out on the page.

I would like to think that the vast majority of the time, those speaking for social justice, and those speaking for scientific truth - as much as it can be verified today - (without biases associated with certain funding sources) were on the same page, so it really rubbed me the wrong way, took me out of the story, to see the opposite presented as what seems like the dominant thread between the two groups in this novel. This was technically background to other discussions going on in the book, but very distracting for me.

Heads up if you're going to read the ‘novelette' included within this book, in an impressive imitation of early modern sci fi serials, it's got a lot of questionable content, and also some pretty gross descriptions. It echoes some plot points/themes discussed in the main text, so I honestly think you can skip it, no problem, and save yourself a few disturbing mental images.🤢 How it is a work of fiction which manages to reflect the actions in the world of the story, and why it's author, who is also a professor, is repeatedly referred to as a cult leader, if it's not really going to be explored, just makes me a little annoyed, having read it and not getting the full pay off.

This book is dense in a number of respects. Fair warning from an accessibility stand point: the font choices can make the text hard to read, and for whatever reason, (paper choice?), this is an exceptionally, unusually heavy hard back. Take care of your wrists!

Will need to look up own voices' reviews to see how the autistic rep is recieved

⚠️delayed development/disability slur, racial slur, SA Novelette within novel specific warnings: mention of enslavement, forced sex work/SA, bestiality (?!), cannibalism, body horror