Book Club - Grace Chan’s Every Version of You

Grace Chan is a speculative fiction writer and psychiatrist. Her short fiction has appeared in Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, amongst many others, and she has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards, the Norma K Hemming Award, and Viva la Novella.  Today I’ve brought in Grace Chan’s techno-futurist novel Every Version of You. In the not too distant future Australia, like much of the world around it, is a harsh and hostile place to live. Those with the means can protect themselves in hermetically sealed apartments and even afford the occasional luxury of fresh food that grew in the earth rather than a lab. Tao-Yi and Navin have grown up in a world in decline and have watched as their existence moved into increasingly digital spaces. The world of Gaia began as a digital frontier but now it is the place where Tao-Yi works and socialises. Gaia’s immersive nature parallels the declines in Navin’s health until it seems there is little choice but for Navin to upload himself permanently into the system. What harm could it do? Navin is convinced there are only benefits as he stares down his own mortality. So much of their lives already pass in Gaia, this would just be making it official. Tao-Yi is less sure. Her mother stubbornly refuses to log in and Tao-Yi doesn’t know what it will mean for all of their humanity if she lets go of this terrestrial life. --------- I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy from way back, and while I rarely worry about the emergence of dragons into my workaday life, there is always something of a concern about bracket creep when it comes to near future speculative fiction. Where twenty years ago Every Version of You might have sat alongside The Matrix as firmly in the realm of science fiction. Now we can read updates on our own digital proxies about Neuralink implant chips into people’s brains. I’m confident that I’ll get this to you before the tech outpaces the story but not so much about the longevity of this review as anything other than an artifact. And so it becomes essential to engage with stories like Every Version of You, and so much the better that Grace Chan’s novel is such a compelling read! The story is refreshingly ordinary even as it stretches us into the digital fantastic. The world of Tao-Yi and Navin is circumscribed much in the ways all our lives were during the pandemic and hence their escape into Gaia all the more relatable. The world of Gaia is both incredible and prosaic. Never fear that tachyon processing will free us of our most banal predispositions. Every Version of You assures us that we will still have insecurity and jealousy, but so also will we have ambition and love. Traveling alongside Tao-Yi we must face the possibility that the digital world is our world but that it cannot perfectly coexist with our flesh and blood selves. This entanglement is not clear cut and I cannot assure the book offers answers. It is the journey that is the adventure as we struggle alongside Tao-Yi and Navin to understand how they might continue to exist and to be themselves when so much of what that means is disappearing. This is also a love story and that was what completely suckered me into the futurism. I’m not so sure what it might mean to live forever, digitally or otherwise, but it has long been a concern of fiction to wonder how that long life and all its changes might impact our hearts. Could you love someone digitally and how do we let go of the humanness that comes with life as we know it. These are the real questions of speculative and science fiction; not how do we transcend our mortality, but how do we hold on when it seems to be escaping us?