Every Kansas City neighbourhood in Masters X is real: Miller Nichols Library at UMKC, Westport, Quality Hill above the West Bottoms, Genessee Street and the West Bottoms' industrial blocks. The buildings the novel puts there, and the events, are fiction. The geography is exact.
The Record
Kansas City, Missouri — not to be confused with Kansas City, Kansas — is a mid-sized American city of approximately 500,000 people at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. It is historically significant as a gateway city for westward expansion, a rail hub, and a center of American jazz culture.
The specific locations in the novel include: Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) — a real campus library, the primary research library for the university at 800 E. 51st Street. Quality Hill — a historically significant neighborhood on the western edge of downtown Kansas City, developed in the late nineteenth century as the city's first elite residential district. The West Bottoms — the low-lying industrial district west of downtown, below the bluffs, historically a stockyards and meatpacking area, now a mix of antique markets, event spaces, and artists' studios.
Genessee Street — a street in the West Bottoms, the old stockyards and warehouse district below Quality Hill, where the novel places the Foundation's operational base in a disused cold-storage warehouse. The street is real; the building is the novel's. Westport — a neighborhood district of bars, restaurants, and shops in the midtown area of Kansas City, historically significant as the last outfitting point for wagon trains heading west.
The Pattern
Kansas City is an underused setting in American literary fiction — despite its significant history, its unusual geography (built on river bluffs above a wide floodplain), its role in jazz history, and the striking contrast between its dense historic neighborhoods and its underground limestone infrastructure. The city rewards close attention: the bluffs above the West Bottoms, the view from Quality Hill toward the river, the strange persistence of the stockyards grid in streets now occupied by antique dealers and wedding venues.
SubTropolis, entered through a few portals in the bluffs off NE Underground Drive, is one of the great invisible urban landmarks in America. The city has layers — geological, historical, architectural — that most of its own residents have never fully registered. Masters X is partly an argument that Kansas City is stranger and more significant than American fiction has so far noticed.
The Fiction
Blake Masters' Kansas City is the city as it physically exists, rendered as precisely as the author can manage. The corner table at Miller Nichols Library is in the right part of the building, near the right radiator. The walk from Quality Hill down to the West Bottoms follows the actual grade of the bluffs. The Genessee Street blocks smell of river water and old brick, as the novel says.
What happens in those locations — Blake's firing from SubTropolis, the discovery of his grandfather's notebooks, the meetings with Nadia and Andrew, the events in the West Bottoms warehouse — is the novel’s invention. The city itself is not. The author lives there.
The corner table at Miller Nichols Library had been Blake Masters' territory for three years.
Back to the wall. Clear sightline to both exits. Close enough to the radiator to stay warm in October, far enough to avoid the clanking when the old pipes kicked on. His grandfather had taught him to choose seats like this. Always know your exits.
— Masters X: The Inheritance of Frequency
Get the opening chapters free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Masters X is fiction. The historical places, manuscripts, and scientific research described in The Record are real and sourced. The events, characters, and fictional interpretations described in The Fiction are invented by the author and presented clearly as such.