In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise, 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, preferring instead to indulge in memories of her 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. Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in, this is speculative literary fiction at its best.

Quick book review

If you start reading Every Version of You and think it’s a bit slow… keep going! I selected this book as a holiday read because of the mind uploading subject matter, but of course it’s not all about the technology. In fact, Grace Chan skirts over the how as that’s not really important. What’s important is the impact on society (already suffering from destructive climate change) and individuals. And particularly, relationships between those individuals, all with different reasons for being interested, or not, in uploading themselves permanently to the cloud. By first setting the scene and the background to the main characters lives it makes for a truly thought provoking second half. Highly recommended.