Hello and welcome to Track of Words for today’s author interview with the fantastic Grace Chan, in which we’re going to be talking about her debut novel Every Version of You – out now from Verve Books. Set in Australia in the not-too-distant future, Every Version of You is a darkly fascinating exploration of identity, environment and technological impact, the sort of book that hooks you in and leaves you thinking about it for a long time afterwards. I was delighted to have the chance to chat to Grace about this intriguing book – I hope you enjoy this interview, and I really recommend picking up Every Version of You!
ToW: To start things off, can you give us an overview of Every Version of You and what readers can expect from it?
Grace Chan: Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive virtual reality called Gaia. Meanwhile, their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments.
On the outskirts of Melbourne, in the decaying real world, Tao-Yi’s mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her life in Malaysia.
When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain into Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important to her.
I wrote Every Version of You to grapple with various ideas: the different phases of love and loss, the impermanence of all things, climate devastation, our incessant consumption of technology and content, our relationships with our bodies.
ToW: You’ve got a couple of key characters in Every Version of You – without spoiling anything, could you give us a quick sense of who Tao-Yi and Navin are, and what readers might need to know about them?
GC: Tao-Yi is a Malaysian-Chinese immigrant to Australia. She works as an Authenticity Consultant: a new-era, corporation-employed therapist to youngsters with existential crises. Navin moves to Melbourne for Tao-Yi, but the surgery that Tao-Yi organises for Navin goes wrong, and now he lives with chronic pain.
Their relationship has grown complex and tender over the years, but they are pulled in different directions as technology and ecological collapse accelerate around them. Navin is increasingly drawn into the virtual, yearning to leave his body behind. Tao-Yi is grappling with her “perpetual homesickness”, trying to figure out what anchors her: is it her relationships, her heritage, her body, or something else?
ToW: You set this story in a not-too-far future Australia, which feels worryingly believable. Could you talk a bit about that setting, and some of the key elements of the global backstory you went with?
GC: I haven’t seen much science fiction set in the country that I grew up in, so I knew from the get-go that I wanted to feature places that are close to home. In the first draft, the story took place in the 22nd century, but I quickly realised that the future I was describing felt much closer to the present day. Bringing it into the late 21st century gives it that “worryingly believable-ness,” I think—the climate devastation and the dependence on technology feel more present-day than science-fiction.
I allude to certain global events, like the complete fracturing of the Australian-US alliance. Navin talks about the destitution in San Francisco. I didn’t go into worldbuilding in detail, but I imagined the US becoming increasingly authoritarian, to the detriment of its citizens and leading to a mid-century war. The state of the climate is an extrapolation from today, if we continue to do very little. In Every Version of You, people have buried their heads in technology, because it’s shiny and easy.
ToW: When you were planning and writing this story, was there ever a point when you thought you might opt for a less dystopian vision of the future, without the history of war and climate disaster? I wonder how something like Uploading would look without the sense of escaping from a dying world…
GC: I wish I could say I did consider a less dystopian world, but alas – I did not. The funny thing is, I wasn’t consciously trying to craft a dystopia. I was merely trying to extrapolate from the present. I suppose that’s a depressing rather than funny answer, but I suspect it’s also why many readers have found the book confronting and relevant! It certainly would be cool to imagine a virtual world with grassroots origins, designed to benefit the community and interact harmoniously with the environment.
ToW: Back to the characters – where did Tao-Yi and Navin come from, and their increasingly complex relationship? Did you have their personalities locked in right from the beginning, or did they evolve over time as you worked on the book?
GC: They were there from the very first scribble in my notebook. Their relationship is the core of the novel. Tao-Yi is the brain in the partnership: she is reflective, independent, compassionate, wry, pragmatic, and always trying to find herself by caring for others. Navin is the soul: he is sensitive, earnest, idealistic, intellectual, and romantic. I had a great time getting to know them in more detail as I wrote. After spending years with them, they feel so real to me.
Grace’s short fiction has been published in all sorts of places, including Clarkesworld magazine
ToW: And what about Tao-Yi’s mother, Xin-Yi? Their mother-daughter relationship feels like the other key axis of the book, bringing in questions of family history, identity and heritage for Tao-Yi to wrestle with. What was it like building up that relationship and exploring those themes?
GC: Honestly, this was such a challenging relationship to develop. Xin-Yi is a rather slippery character: her love for Tao-Yi is intense but carefully concealed, mixed-up with shame about her depression, the loss of migrating to a new country, and leaving behind so much of her family and her culture.
It took a long time to feel satisfied that I had given their relationship enough depth. I travelled to Malaysia and walked around Ipoh, which is my mother’s hometown. I redrafted the mother-daughter scenes many times and wrote background notes on Tao-Yi, Xin-Yi, and Tao-Yi’s grandmother to help me to understand the characters as real people: complex, multifaceted, uncategorisable.
ToW: I found the idea of the technology at play in the book both intriguing and disturbing – the endless possibilities of Gaia contrasting with what’s been lost to both technology and environmental damage. The way Tao-Yi reflects on not remembering the taste of real meat, or not knowing how close scents in Gaia are to the real-world originals. What was it like immersing yourself in these juxtapositions and imagining the impact they would have on people?
GC: I’m honoured that you picked up on these sensory details. Anytime we accept a technology into our lives, we gain something and we lose something. I find it very sad to think about the things we lose—species going extinct, language and culture being obliterated, the loss of knowledge, the loss of life. It’s a different sort of sadness too, to consider the things that we aren’t even aware of having lost. You can’t know the feeling of sand between your toes if you’ve never experienced it, but perhaps you can miss it, in a strange way.
ToW: There’s something quite sinister about a lot of the technology in Every Version of You, from the countless tiny legs of a ReVision to the idea of floating in a bath of Neugel with only your face visible – not to mention the psychological implications of Uploading. Was that intentional? Do you think a sense of body horror is inevitable with a story like this?
GC: Yes and yes! I tend to use a lot of sensory imagery in my writing, especially tactile descriptions – I think it’s an excellent way to create empathy in the reader and to transport the reader directly into the character’s body. I do think body horror is necessary and inevitable in a story about relinquishing the body to technology.
ToW: Devices or technologies like ReVision and Gaia felt very much like natural extensions of the questions or commentaries posed by classic SF technologies – like the parlour walls in Fahrenheit 451. Were you consciously drawing on any particular references when coming up with these concepts, whether literary or otherwise?
GC: The parlour walls do sound a lot like our algorithm-driven social media feeds: attention-grabbing and void of meaning. I suppose I was trying to imagine what it would be like if your phone were implanted into your brain. Constant notifications, emails, social media updates, beamed directly into your cortex. A horrifying union with the virtual! The viscerality of lying in a pod of gel, plugged into a digital world, is a riff on The Matrix – a formative movie for me.
ToW: I have to ask…how engaged do you see yourself getting with technologies like Gaia, if you lived in Tao-Yi and Navin’s world? Would you be tempted to Upload?
GC: I wrote Every Version of You because I feel so ambiguous about technology. Like everyone else, I succumb to the allure: the gratification, the convenience, the fear of missing out, the addictive dopamine hits sucked out of my brain by the algorithms that know you better than you know yourself.
I can definitely see myself hanging out in Gaia. And if all my loved ones were Uploading, I’d surely be tempted to Upload too, even though I’d try to hold out. I wrote this book before the ubiquity of large language models like ChatGPT, but the question of what we give up to technology feels even more crucial today.
ToW: Finally, if you had access to technology like Gaia, and could create any location or setting imaginable, what would you build and why?
GC: I’d geek out and create a gigantic role-playing game world where you could design a fantastical avatar for yourself, cast spells, hunt for treasure and go on wild adventures. A magical utopia, disconnected from the rules of our world…and there would be chocolate. A lot of chocolate.
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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, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine and many other places. Grace was born in Malaysia and lives and works on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist.
Find out more at Grace’s website.
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Thanks so much to Grace for the fantastic answers and an absolutely fascinating novel, and also to Frances at Verve Books for organising this interview.
I hope this has whetted your appetite for Every Version of You, which is out now from Verve Books – check out the link below to order* your copy:
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