Every Version of You

Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in, in this speculative literary novel about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality.

n late-twenty-first-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialize and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia. When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future or an authentic past.

Grace Chan is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. She writes about brains, minds and space. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, won the University of Sydney’s People’s Choice Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize and The Age Book of the Year. It was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards. It has been optioned for a film adaptation by Cognito Entertainment. Grace’s short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Fireside, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, Androme