Fiction Reviews
Every Version of You
(2022 /2025) Grace Chan, Verve Books, £10.99, pbk, 287pp, ISBN 978-0-857-30915-0
First published in Australia in2022, this 2025 edition is its first UK outing. Every Version of You is a debut novel set in Australia. It is a competent, thought provoking narrative that is definitely worth a read. It is a near-future, cautionary tale with a cyberpunk vibe. It all sounds frighteningly plausible, too, at least in initial setup. Increasingly everybody logs on to an immersive world, allowing their bodies to rot in sad, darkened apartments. Ultimately, the technology allows for permanent digital upload with no need to maintain corporeal bodies. So most of the world disappears into big server blocks leaving just a few who can’t – or won’t – sever ties with the real world.
So far, so Black Mirror. But it is the characters and the human dilemmas that drive this narrative and the protagonist – Tao-Yi – has some impossible choices to make. She has got a mother who refuses to engage in the new online world, and as physical infrastructure declines from underuse (the airports all close, for instance, and the streets (and shops) are empty), she’s increasingly dependent on her daughter. Plus there’s Tau-Yi’s husband, Navin, who leaves his disability behind and redefines himself in the online world. Does Taiu-Yi join him, or increasingly make excuses for her heel-dragging?
Are the uploaded people the same? To a large extent they can now define their own realities and have a different relationship with life, death and the stages in between so almost certainly not. Are they happier? Are they even human?
Naviin doesn’t need sleep any more and his brain speeds up, unfettered by the constraints of physicality. Tau-Yi can barely keep up with him and she increasingly finds the balance of their relationship shifting, But she has got an incentive to join him: she, like her mother, has a degenerative brain condition that online immortality would cure. But at what expense?
As directions of travel go, this one’s scary, and the thought of a transcendent humanity entirely dependent on massive server banks in the desert heat tended by robots sounds disturbingly fragile. Plus the world they create – of boundless possibility – is instead an insular one of pointless circularity. Sounds like hell.
Recommended.
Mark Bilsborough
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