Points Unguessed and Unimaginable: Kristen Alvanson’s XYZT

Kristen Alvanson’s intoxicating work of theory-fiction for the K-Pulp series delivers a fiction virus into reality via an experimental teleportation system

We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.

david cronenberg, eXistenZ

The early XYZT was not yet reliable. The displacement ratio was high.

Kristen Alvanson, XYZT

Two books of theory-fiction in, and Urbanomic’s K-Pulp series may just be the most thrilling literary outlet of the moment. The first, Simon Sellars’s Applied Ballardianism was an out-there JG Ballard primer, exploded memoir and surprisingly science-fictional narrative all at the same time. At least it took me by surprise that I was so taken in by its memoirist clothing. For someone rather keen on the self-conscious insertion of reality into fiction – the bookish game playing of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, to Paul Auster’s literal authorial presence in City of Glass or the subtle and miraculous auto-fiction of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – I clung to Sellars’s untruths longer than I might usually have. Although in the end, the picking apart of what can be considered real and what might be unreal is of little actual interest to me; I don’t require such lines to be drawn. That there’s very often more truth in fiction than in fact is a notion I’ve embraced most of my adult life.

Perhaps my submission to Sellars has to do with where the text’s entry point is. Sellars begins with the memoir and the thesis, and gradually submerges those into novelistic waters. Kristen Alvanson, on the other hand, almost does the opposite. XYZT is clearly a novel from the outset, albeit one that is deeply informed by her experiences as an American living in Iran during the 2000s. That’s not to say that many novelists don’t already draw from their life as a matter of course (take Philip Roth’s body of work) or as a staging area for flights into fantasy (consider William Burroughs and the descent into Interzone). Something other is at play here though. The infection of fiction occurs at a deep narrative level within XYZT, its disruptions transmit as warnings rather than exercises in meta-fiction.

Indeed Alvanson uses XYZT as a means to probe at the precarious world in which we live, its fictional walls reconstructed as our reality. That this reality is then broken down by a deep cover fiction virus makes it seem as if the infection has escaped the boundaries of the unreal. It’s rather like the layers of reality within David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, with its disorienting cuts between states; it becomes increasingly challenging to assert if one is within the real or the constructed, and indeed whether it matters anymore. By the end of the book, eXistenZ itself is (perhaps) revealed as a key to unlocking the meaning behind the technology known as XYZT. It’s a subtle nod which nevertheless packs a punch of recognition.

Structurally, XYZT presents untitled entries that form an ongoing narrative, interspersed with titled chapters that are essentially short stories focusing on different characters. The mechanics of the XYZT tech is gradually revealed across each of these threads. It is a teleportation device that allows individuals to travel across great distances almost instantaneously. This much is clear quite early on. The device’s creators, Amir and Kade, aim to test it by conducting a cross-cultural experiment between the USA (where they are based at MIT) and Iran (their home country). Volunteers are sent to “hosts” in the other country, where they are given three hours to have an authentic experience of how the other lives. However, like Jeff Goldblum’s teleportation experiments in The Fly, the results are not predictable in every instance.  

XYZT may be viewed as some sort of corollary to China Miéville’s The City & the City, although that text presented a situation where two distinct cultures literally occupied the same geographical space. In XYZT, Alvanson bridges a significant geographical distance with invented tech to insert people into the lives of others. The character of Estella becomes the reader’s constant, as she attempts to solve the mystery of XYZT, a trail of which has been left behind by her sometimes-colleague Amir, who is now missing. The trail begins with a mysterious black box, which of course cannot remain closed. Upon opening the box, “without knowing why, [Estella] felt an awful, vertiginous sense of responsibility at what she had unleashed.”

It would seem that the use of the technology has not so much let something out, as punctured the places where reality is thin. The first time this occurs is a beautifully disorientating experience. An American called Greisen is sent to Yazd, but finds himself outside the urban area, in a derelict part of the Old City. Javad, a sort of amateur archaeologist in the fortune and glory mode, is attempting to get into the underground water system beneath a two-hundred-year-old house, and enlists Greisen’s help. Up to this point, Alvanson has alluded to a teleportation device, so science-fiction is on the table, but that doesn’t prepare the reader for the sudden manifestation of Persian myth. The characters are even more unprepared to deal with this shifting reality. Underground, they encounter treasure beyond their wildest dreams, yet it is guarded by a demon known as a deav. The deav will allow them to take as much treasure as they can carry – for he has more than enough – but he warns there will be consequences. They nevertheless accept his terms and fill their pockets, but it transpires that the deav wants their eyes. Greisen tries to appeal to the demon’s sense of logic: if they are blinded they will be trapped down here with him forever, and surely he doesn’t wish that. “The deav thought for a moment. He didn’t want them hanging around, but he did want their eyes.” So he takes one eye from each of them and the pair are swept “away once and for all” after attempting to leave.

A subsequent chapter has two American tourists in seeming peril, about to be cooked and eaten in a Bazaar restaurant. Although it turns out this is merely a joke perpetrated by the host’s uncles, all bets are off after the deav. Neither is it only the case that mythology encroaches upon the world in which we live. There’s a vital chapter (“Arkham: A Rat in the Rafters”) where an Iranian finds himself not in the America he was expecting, but instead in an America of cosmic unease. The dimensions of the house, he discovers, are impossible and he must conclude that he has landed in a Lovecraftian universe. We also get some important information about the tech: “XYZ for Euclidean coordinates and T for Time – but how could he travel to a place that didn’t even exist? Slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable.” It’s intoxicating stuff.

XYZT is a book concerned with the potential of cross-cultural human interactions, but also its apparent failures. Kristen Alvanson wonders at the imaginative drive it takes for us to create and the dangers inherent in such creations. She has written a fearless investigation of the outer-limits of human experience, a deep dive into now that takes in mythological pasts, fictional pocket universes and dystopian high-tech futures. It’s nothing less than One Thousand and One Nights reconfigured by Primer and as such will be pored over for years to come.

XYZT by Kristen Alvanson is published by Urbanomic as part of their K-Pulp series.