Piers Anthony’s Omnivore, Orn, and OX were the first alternate universe books I read. The only earlier thing in that territory for me was Moorcock’s Eternal Champion sequence. That’s doing something else entirely.
What Anthony did in those books was build several universes that each held together on their own terms. Not variations on one place, and not a single strange world visited once and left behind. Separate systems, each with its own logic, each internally consistent enough that you could reason inside it. I wanted to see what that would be like to write. That’s the whole origin of this novel. Not a message and not an argument. A form I’d admired as a reader and had never tried. So it needed a device, and somebody to find it. The device is a projector about the size of a large hardcover book, with a ring around its middle and forty-three symbols on the ring. The man who finds it maps condemned buildings for a living and writes everything down.
What’s the device in Altverse?
A projector with a ring around its middle and forty-three symbols on the ring. Each symbol opens somewhere else. Turn the ring and the hallway revises its opinion about perspective, the vanishing point shifts sideways over two or three seconds, and a door appears in a wall that didn’t have one. The air at the edges of the door smells of rain. Not rain happening. Rain remembered.
Forty-three is a working number with nothing mystical in it. It’s enough destinations that the book doesn’t depend on any single one, and enough that the person holding it’ll never see them all.
The book on this: Altverse is a novel about a man who maps condemned buildings and finds a device with forty-three symbols on its ring, each one opening somewhere else.
Who is Ari in Altverse?
A man who maps condemned buildings for a living.
Six weeks on a contract noting crack propagation in load-bearing walls, foundation drift, the slow lean of an east wing toward its neighbor. Photographing what’s about to stop existing so that a record survives the demolition.
That job is the reason he’s the right person to find the device. His instinct on picking it up is that the thing is going to be destroyed with the building on Friday and it should exist in a record somewhere. So the notebook comes out. Material, dimensions, weight estimate, the ring.
Then he turns the ring, and stands in the open doorway for eleven seconds, and nothing gets written in those eleven seconds.
What point of view is Altverse written in?
Close third on Ari, past tense, all the way through, and the prose does what a cartographer does.
I researched the approach while I was writing and I no longer remember what it’s called. It’s common enough to this kind of book. What it does is keep the sentences to observed fact, arriving in order, without the narrator explaining what any of it means.
Ari is named more than nine hundred times in the novel and never once takes a pronoun. Everybody else in the book does. That’s deliberate, and readers tend to notice somewhere in the second chapter without being able to say what they noticed.
Holding that rule for a whole novel was hard, and it’s one of the choices I’m proudest of in the book. I think it does more to make Ari a cartographer than anything he says or does.
What’s the flat hour in Altverse?
The first hour in any new world, filtered through professional habit.
When Ari crosses over, the world arrives as data. Dimensions, light quality, temperature, sound profile. The desert is information. The tones in the air are information. The pale rock under the boots is information. That’s a cartographer working, and it’s the mode he’s spent a career in.
What the flat hour doesn’t produce is any of the other thing. No emotional response. No felt experience. Nothing registered as pain or as beauty. Those are simply absent from the page for an hour.
Then the flat hour ends, always in the middle of a scene, and the world becomes real.
The emotional content of the novel lives in that gap, in the distance between the world as data and the world as presence, and the moment the second one arrives. I loved writing those moments. Holding a whole hour flat and then letting it break open in the middle of a scene is the part of the book I’d defend hardest.
What does Ari’s notebook do in Altverse?
It changes from an instrument into a ledger.
At the start it’s a survey tool. Accurate, categorical, professional, the same notebook a man uses to record crack propagation in a condemned building. Material, dimensions, weight estimate, the ring. By the end it’s carrying debts. What Ari owes, to whom, and for what, accumulating across worlds in a form that started out as measurements. The turn is traceable in specific places instead of announced. The two-note format at the end of the second chapter. The lie in the third. The ledger entries near the end. A reader who goes back can watch the instrument become an account.
What is Altverse about?
A documenter who stops being able to document.
After the first door, Ari sits on the floor of the maintenance corridor for about forty minutes with the notebook open to a blank page and the pen not moving. Something has changed in the room and it isn’t the projector or the light or the cold coffee.
That’s what drives the book. A man whose way of handling the world is to write it down encounters things that won’t go into a notebook, and keeps trying anyway. I have a lot of affection for Ari because of that stubbornness. There’s something sad and admirable in a man who keeps writing when the page can’t hold what happened, and I wanted both of those to sit in the same scene.
The universes are real and each one is its own problem.
A city lit from inside its own buildings, where a woman named Meren is fighting a council that’s already decided her district’s failing grid doesn’t matter. A desert that answers when you make a sound. A garden that’s inverted. A market where memory is the commodity.
What does the ring cost to use?
The mechanism takes something on the way through, and Venn is the one who explains it. Greenlight City will be in the notebook and not in the chest. The people Ari met will be names instead of presences. The weight that’s been accumulating, the ledger, the texture of what it felt like to be in those places and do what was done there.
All of that goes into the mechanism and doesn’t come back.
That conversation happens in an ordinary morning street with a hardware store and a bus going past. That’s where I wanted it. A man whose entire method is recording is being told that the record is the only part he gets to keep.
Why does the eighth symbol matter in Altverse?
Because Ari had been putting it off.
The first seven were approached in sequence without much deliberation, the ring turned one position at a time, the sequence followed because following the sequence is the logic of the device.
The eighth sits differently. Its face, if a symbol on a rotating ring can be said to have one, is angled slightly off the indexing point, as though it were placed just outside the expected position on purpose. As though it were meant to be found somewhat after the seventh instead of immediately following it.
A device with forty-three destinations and one of them positioned to be reached late is a device somebody designed, and that’s a different book from a device somebody merely found.
How do the worlds ask something of Ari?
By treating a notebook as a strange object.
In Greenlight City, Meren walks him through a failing grid and explains that the infrastructure budget doesn’t cover replacement until next quarter, if the council approves next quarter’s budget, and that the budget cycle ends in three weeks. Ari writes it down.
She notices. She asks why. He says because it should be in a record somewhere. She reads the notebook, and then looks at him, and something happens in her face that he doesn’t read correctly, which he notes is a thing the flat hour also does. It puts things in the wrong category. Then she asks where he’s from. He says somewhere that doesn’t have any of this.
Ysel is the other side of it. Asked how many they’re carrying, Ysel answers enough, holding one hand in the other with the grip of somebody preventing spillage. The two of them sit on a wall while the market runs and the rain makes a steady white sound on the roof, and Ari writes and Ysel watches and neither says anything for a long time.
The scene on the wall with Ysel is one of my favorites in the book. Almost nothing happens in it, and I think it’s where the novel is clearest about what Ari is losing.
Is Altverse part of a series?
No. It’s a standalone, and it was always going to be.
The point was to write several worlds inside one book, not one world across several books. That’s what Anthony did and it’s what I wanted to try.
It’s been a long time since I wrote it. What holds up on rereading isn’t the worlds, which were the fun part, but the man with the notebook who can’t use it any more.
I’d write him the same way again. Too much portal fiction treats other worlds like a theme park you can leave without a scratch, and I wanted every door in this book to cost the man walking through it.
