Rian Hughes

Computer geniuses use software and their own developed virtual reality equipment to decode alien signals, while an astronaut based on the moon has a direct encounter with an alien species, whereby she manages to link up with it and develop her own amazing ability to relocate herself at will.
Any book that begins with Jodrell Bank and David Bowie's Starman must be good! A whole cacophony of interesting subjects: Aliens, Memetic engineering, the Wow! Signal of 1977, Skeuomorphs, Gogmagog, Kirlian auras, Electronic Voice Phenomena, Tesla's free energy, the paranormal, to name but a few.
Set in London, at Jodrell Bank, and on the fictional Daedalus moon-base, the novel is about mysteries of decoding messages from data streams from space; I can't help but love this story and notice a parallel with the same work major Briggs was working on in Twin Peaks. (Even the black box on the cover reflected the one featured in Twin Peaks). Many little things mentioned in the text made my heart swell with appreciation (eg Burroughs' cut-up technique, Dan Dare, and Joy Division).
The Daedalus footage section is very reminiscent of House of Leaves, or Blair Witch Project. Dana (the astronaut)'s expedition down the volcano tunnel in the moon to reach the anomaly, by pushing her way though...into an underground city was VERY ALICE!
Chapter 10 (each chapter number indicated by dominoes) was particularly descriptive illustrating Jack's over-thinking; the details running through his mind, to reply to a message. Turned out the alien could communicate through Jack; when he took random photos of words, the pictures revealed sentences. "Build me a body". Jack's creation of Digital Memetic Entities is fascinating.
The text itself has many variations in style (and fonts), included there is a huge Shakespearean-style rant from xx about "ideas", and their desire for a better world; and an excerpt on Plato's Socrates argument against the written word - that you cannot discuss, change ideas, evolve to better words; newspaper articles; emails; binary codes; Wikipedia entries; maps, photographs, and drawings; and a science fiction serial story between chapters.
This thought-provoking and stimulating book.
There's even some music been made associated with the book: Citizen Void by Celestial Mechanic.… (altro)

Brilliant. A story that begins with the London clay and Thanet sand at a construction site underneath London, and progresses to intelligent extra-terrestrial life via a club of steam train enthusiasts (which included Winston Churchill). Full of technical drawings and atmospheric photographs. All in B&W. References to Gogmagog, Vimana, Kumari Kandam, Ultima Thule & Atlantis, Tachyon, Beltane witch, Pwyll journey to the underworld, Katabasis, and Ziggurat. The story ends up in the air, with an optimistic hope for the future.… (altro)

I bought this mistakenly thinking it was a graphic novel, and remembering Hughes’s name from the excellent Dare from 1990, which, yes, was thirty years ago (and yes, I have a copy) and was probably not a good reason to shell out for a first edition hardback but it looked interesting… And it was not what I expected at all, it’s an actual prose novel, but it’s also really good. Jodrell Bank receives a “Signal from Space”, and after some investigation discovers it is the DNA of billions of aliens, of millions of alien races, encoded. Meanwhile, an alien spacecraft has crashed into the Moon, and the astronaut sent to investigate finds a (barely) live alien, which dumps its memories into her brain. Back on Earth, an AI start-up, whose lead programmer (of a team of two) seems to have implausibly built half the computer systems mentioned in the novel, gets involved and discovers a way to a) create AIs from memes, which represent the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (the 20th Century one is called XX, as in the novel’s title, which, given the story, seems a strange choice of title), and b) thoroughly explore the “Grid”, which is a virtual representation of the aliens in the Signal from Space, including digging through its layers to uncover its history, and so the history of the universe. It all gets a bit cosmological, and the hacker character’s skills and experience are hardly plausible… Not to mention that the story is basically resolved through his genius and the implanted alien memories in the astronaut’s head… But I did enjoy the ride. There’s lots of typographical tricks used throughout the novel, as well as a number of “found documents”, including a mock-up of a serialised novel from an invented Golden Age sf magazine… which reminds me of a book by someone or other that did something similar… Recommended.… (altro)