XYZT

by Kristen Alvanson

Genre-defying fiction that accelerates "cross-cultural dialogue" into a kaleidoscopic rush of sensory estrangements, fairy tales, and alien encounters."There's really no difference between us and them, so we're told…."

Based on the author's experiences of living as an American in Iran, Kristen Alvanson's XYZT is a wildly imaginative dramatization of the idea of a "dialogue of civilizations" and its potentially outlandish ramifications.

As part of an advanced technological test program, volunteers are shuttled back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each is given a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home.

But far from heralding the bliss of mutual recognition, the experiment unleashes a series of displacements so disorienting that the fabric of reality begins to fray. Ordinary people become entangled in extraordinary situations, and everyday life bleeds into mythological encounters, alternate universes and dark psychedelic journeys in alien lands where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable.

A treasury of tales told from multiple perspectives and in a multiplicity of styles, XYZT is an audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what "they" see, and a science-fictional, nonstandard engagement with anthropology in which cross-cultural encounters take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, Literature, Fantasy

251 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 9, 2019

Reviews

[Amin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A poor Lovecraft rip-off and take on "theory fiction".

[Josh Carswell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second publication to come from Urbanomic’s K-Pulp imprint, Kristen Alvanson’s XYZT is a novelistic account of a series of bilateral cultural exchanges between the USA and Iran. Compositionally, it’s similar to something like Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, a series of vignettes detailing the displacement of figures (volunteer test subjects) from one locale to the other. The text has an autobiographical element to it: Alvanson, an American, has spent several years in Iran, and no doubt has accumulated a number of anecdotes both first and second hand concerning social and geographical dislocations along this particular line. Subjects of the experimental XYZT programme are given just three hours in which to make contact with their “hosts”, waiting for them on the other side – and the results vary from the mundane to the utterly fantastical. There are straightforward plots, which go according to plan, and others which, due to “interference”, splinter off at strange tangents, and no two experiences are similar. In this sense, the bundle offered up by XYZT functions as a microcosm of an embodied reality for everyday Iranian-American encounters, like an animation developed from many unique cels. Yet it is a reality, or rather several overlapping structures of the real, that is narrated through an oneiric, alien haze; the specific dynamics of each chapter producing a combined methodology for interrogating the variegated conceptions of worldly composition – the literary equivalent of a nest of vipers or a rat king.

Full review at orbistertius

[Cy]

Interesting premise, amateur writing

[zunggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild 'n' crazy novel in which a couple of MIT geniuses invent a way to teleport people by means of a magic bracelet and some GPS jiggery-pokery. The beta test involves offering a bunch of Americans and Iranians the chance to spend three hours in each other's countries being looked after by a volunteer host, but while some of the swaps go to plan and result in the kind of cross-cultural learnings you'd expect, the tech is glitchy and starts opening up cracks in reality and spacetime. So you have glorious vignettes like the one narrated by a scorpion who's adopted by a colony of Sasquatch, or the Lovecraftian one, or the two appearances of the marvelous, mean and beautiful Persian demon called the deav (daeva). Or the mysterious pre-Iranian Lullubi who bake bread in a magical kingdom of their own in the mountains.

What's great about this book is that all the flights of fantasy just about cohere into a story. That, and the cross-cultural stuff steers just clear of children's bookish worthiness with moments of menace and comedy. Generally I don't like the term "experimental" applied to literature but I think it's apt here - an ambitious and sometimes dazzling production.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alvanson's work of "theory-fiction" finds its theory buried quite deep beneath the narrative tapestry. But it is certainly there, and one should best approach this work by means of the method that Reza Negarestani plotted out as reading the work through its plot holes. For the holes or the ruptures in this narrative are what open onto its fundamental underpinnings, and the accelerated slippages in terms of "reality" that it suggests.

The idea behind the XYZT system is inherently flawed. There can never be a simple one to one cultural and Sittlich switch in existential standing which could be commensorably mapped via some sort of Weltanschauung Philosophie, and thus the displaced shifts in the narratives of XYZT which compound or proliferatively unfold, where the real and the symbolic, the real and the imaginary, crash and collapse into a disorienting experience in which fact and fiction, myth and reality, become hallucinatorily  entangled and indissociable while fraying into an undecidable nightmare.

This work also suggests some interesting questions in terms of foreign relations and the question of hospitality. For the host is not only infected by its virus or its infiltrator, the stranger or outsider, but the latter is also infected by the host, always already made stranger even to itself. The shift in positioning rendered explicit by the XYZT bracelet thus foregrounds the experience of loss of identity amongst the shifting realms of culture, which is never a determinate or strictly defined topos, but is rather a multiplicitous and malleable nightmare constructed shakily of a variety of minor visions, of interjected foreigners which come to create the illusion of a stable culture or society out of the mimetic ground (or Abgrund) of what is never properly its own, but always belonging to some abyss of the past, receding into an abyss of the future (never our own, only infecting us, utilizing us as the host for its inhuman proliferation and dissemination of influence and deathly decay as living death or un-life - composed by means of decomposition and putrific proliferation and pullulation)...

I found myself asking partway through the book whether the hallucinatory narratives involving Iranian imagery and deavs provoke the same displacement of reality for us as the introjection of McDonald's and Pirates of the Caribbean might for those others to us for whom we are but others. This is a question that the XYZT system would appear to be able to clarify for us, though it only lapses into its abyssal un(re)cognizability as reality recedes in the diffuse dissolution of stable standpoints on which to ground identity. Even the simple self-relation becomes parasitized by the foreign element of the "who?".

The ultimate question of the work revolves around time and space, and the retro-formative force that the future can have upon the past and present when the fissures in time are rent open. This work harbors a subversive element which might perhaps be termed hyperstitional, thus weaving yet another as yet unavowed relational stitch between Alvanson and Negarestani. For the XYZT bracelet shifts not only spacial position, but also temporal location. Because to move in space is also to be displaced in time (as the earth is always spinning, always circling about the sun...), the bracelet must also be a time travel device - hence the T in addition to the Euclidean coordinates XYZ. The initial test rips a hole or break in the linearity of space-time, collapsing open a differential reality shift in the flow of time and the trajectory of the future which writes what will have been so as to manifest the possibility for its coming to pass.

Thus, what is infected by the rupture of XYZTing is not just cultures, but worlds, times, the division of reality and what might be termed dream, fiction, or hyperreality (accelerated influx of futurity which deterritorializes the present at an accelerated rate which outsrips all attempts at reterritorialization). Yet such a fraying or unweaving of the threads of space-time also open up the potentiality for an-other, different weaving of time(s) and world(s). XYZTance is a complex, auto-reinscriptive narrativization of the actual back from out of the futural potentiality of what remains yet to-come, yet whose powerlessness as of yet holds forth a strange and uncanny influence in the doubly inscriptive creation and erasure of what will have been in this lapsing of the present in this ruptured and corrupted flow.

[Adam Hudson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have used some editing but interesting idea nonetheless.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of an unfortunate situation where the writer’s ambition outpaces their technical abilities. not to say it’s all bad - there’s a few standout chapters (a particularly Lovecraftian one that i really enjoyed) and sometimes i was able to totally overlook its YA style.

one issue with the theory though — we really are living in a monoculture. There are black friday sales in places like Estonia. it doesn’t matter that America is a simulacrum of an actual country with an actual culture. that is the point of hegemony

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I try so hard/really want to like this, but eventually, I didn't find it engaging. The premise of 'subverted cross-cultural (cross-national?) diplomacy' wrapped in a fabulation is promising and some concept relating to Persian demonology and fairy-tale is great. Perhaps the disjointed writing style is just not for me.

[Holden Rasmussen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a great conceptual premise and undoubtedly sound philosophical thought put into it. However, the execution is lacking because the form of the vignette used isn't the best choice the disjunctive and deranging affect Alvanson aims for.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction A472x 2019

[宗儒 李 · Rating 3 out of 5]

我是覺得有點太瞎了

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Promising but ultimately a little disappointing, I could go either way on this book

[-end- · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disorientation as a technique to bridge styles, stories & locales, Alvanson's first novel brings new worlds with every section.