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WHAT happens when our experiences of reality splinter? Two new sci-fi novels explore the idea in very different ways.

The first is XYZT by Kristen Alvanson, with a very provocative premise. A new technology allows volunteers to travel between Iran and the US, with chosen “Hosts” providing an authentic experience of each country. Its inventors, Amir and Kade, hope it will lead to a shared understanding of the world, but the forays prove more divisive than unifying.

The narrative follows scientist Estella as she unlocks the XYZT tech, which plots coordinates in both space and time. Folklore and fantasy bleed across newly opened fault lines in reality, hinting at worlds populated by Sasquatches and jinns, eldritch monsters and gambling demons. But despite the intrusion of such elements, make no mistake: this is high-concept sci-fi. Its exploration of the limits of cross-cultural communication makes for fascinating reading.

The experimental form of the novel mimics its subject matter. The bulk of the story comprises untitled vignettes, which narrate the wildly divergent experiences of the test subjects, from Griesen, who encounters a daeva (a Persian demon) below the old city in Yazd, to a surgeon’s gruesome attempt to remove his own hand so he can bypass the mechanism scheduled to return him to Iran.

As a sci-fi homage to One Thousand and One Nights, the novel succeeds in creating a landscape undermined by alternate realities and mirror universes. But its structure also presents challenges. The sketched-out scenarios can be so disorientating that they risk alienating the reader, and it isn’t always clear that the narrative is more than the sum of its parts.

“XYZT is high-concept sci-fi. Exploring the limits of cross-cultural communication makes fascinating reading”

What happens when a section of society retreats from one reality in favour of another? This is the world conjured in Louis Greenberg’s Green Valley, set in a near future where most of society has retreated from surveillance. The enclave of Green Valley offers an alternative path: a heightened VR within a protected compound. Some chose to enter the compound, but others, like 9-year-old Kira Coady, have grown up knowing nothing else. When two kids sporting Green Valley tech are found dead outside the compound, Kira’s aunt, a law enforcement agent, investigates.

There are excellent examples of books pairing police procedural with sci-fi: both genres work to discover the truth, as layers of secrecy, deceit and misdirection are peeled away to reveal a seedy, often violent, reality.

Take Nick Harkaway’s 2017 Gnomon. There, surveillance and omniscient AI ensure a seemingly utopian society of the sort alluded to in Green Valley. But Harkaway’s novel takes its time to explore the advantages, so when the flaw at the heart of this life is revealed, the reader senses the cost of exposing it. Green Valley, however, shows no obvious appeal in the sugary, overly-managed VR world, and while the novel hints at tension between technophobia and monomaniacal advancement, it opts for crime and punishment to create a fast-paced if conceptually shallow narrative.

Both XYZT and Green Valley are sceptical of tech creators who are self-serving or idealistically naive, but XYZT is the more adventurous. Its fractured narrative resists easy “us” and “them” distinctions in favour of contradictory experiences and perspectives.