Grace Chan, Author at 91av

Book Club: Read an extract from Every Version of You by Grace Chan

Grace Chan — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:30:59 +0000

As Every Version of You opens, New Year’s Eve is being celebrated in a virtual utopia

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The sky’s all wrong tonight. Oversaturated blue, it pixelates at the horizon into streaky seawater, and is hole-punched by the sun sinking towards its bloated reflection. The tide beats against the shore. One, two, three up the sand. One, two, three, four – leaving a sine wave of foam.

Tao-Yi sits with her legs folded beneath her, rotating a nearly empty beer bottle in her hands. Long shadows drip from the sandstone formations around her. In this tucked-away cove, shielded by ruddy cliffs, she can’t see the others, but she can hear them laughing and shouting as they gather driftwood for a bonfire.

She has let Navin drag her here, a little out of obligation, but mostly out of habit. It’s just what happens every New Year’s Eve – Zach throws a party. It would feel wrong to miss it.

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The bottle stays ice-cold against her palms, impervious to her body heat. She lifts the rim to her lips. The last gulp slices down her throat. The ocean ruffles like a silk skirt in a breeze, creased and opaque. She waits for the gust to roll into shore, to lift tendrils of hair from her neck, but it never comes – the air in Gaia is as stale as a subway tunnel.

A rustle of sand grass heralds Navin’s approach. He’s almost a stranger – tall and lean in his short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, black fringe falling choppily across his brow, a vulnerable smile. He holds out another bottle of beer.

“It tastes like shit,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s better than last year’s.”

She manages a smile, thinking of Zach’s experimental brew.

“Come back,” he insists, touching his fingers to her hairline. “Help us start the fire.”

Tao-Yi lets him pull her to her feet. She follows him out of the cove, skirting a cluster of boulders, and back along the shore. His shirt hangs loose on his frame, catching the bottom corners of his shoulder blades. She wants to touch those out-turned brackets, to assure herself of their realness.

Between the dunes and the sea, the others have filled a shallow pit with driftwood. There are a dozen or so capstone-educated twenty-somethings like herself and Navin, all sharp glances and witty repartee. Gen Virtual. They’re the lucky generation – born into motion, soaked with potential, cresting a wave of change.

Zach moves through the group easily, the others drawn to him like mosquitoes to shallow water. In an orange T-shirt and a knee-length sarong, he looks especially boyish. He leans over the driftwood, a lit match extended like a conductor’s baton between long brown fingers. The others whoop as flames blossom. There are no second attempts, if you follow the formula.

Tao-Yi summons her live interface. In the corner of her vision, a countdown glimmers neon: 9:00pm, 31 December 2087. 3 hours to go! A steady scroll of status updates overlays the beach scenery. Mostly snips, four-second video fragments dissolving as soon as she absorbs them into her attention: friends dancing at open-air concerts, go-karting under electronic fireworks, clinking stim shots to a backdrop of pounding beats.

Evelyn is walking over to her. Tao-Yi wills away the countdown and the snips. Tonight, her petite friend looks a little different. Although she’s wearing a pastel dress from her typical wardrobe, her dark brown hair is arranged in braids and her cheeks are decorated with gothic decals. It’s endearing, like a puppy trying to be edgy.

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Evelyn bumps her hip against Tao-Yi’s. “Are you flash?” “I’m fine. Why?”

“You just seem quiet.”

Tao-Yi wraps her hands around her elbows, feeling the symmetrical indentations behind the bony joints. “Yeah, I’m just a bit spent. Busy day at work.”

“Oh yeah. Of course. You’re a hot shot Authenticity Consultant now.” Evelyn drags the syllables out and chuckles.

The title still sounds weird to Tao-Yi’s ears, even though she’s been at her job for half a year. She’s still getting her head around moving from a marketing gig, manipulating people into buying more stuff, to a place like Tru U, guiding lost souls back towards their true selves.

“People are just obsessed with their avatars. They want to make sure they look as unique as everyone else, you know.”

“Usoo, Tao-Yi, don’t pretend to be a cynic. I know you’re really a softie underneath,” Evelyn says. “Give it a few more months, and you’ll be spreading feel-good virus like your boss. What’s his name again? Andy? Gary?”

“Griffin. Not even close.”

“That’s right. You know what he said to me at that party you dragged me to last month? Wide eyes, straight face. You need to find your path.”

“Oh, yeah. He spouts that about ten times a day. My brain just filters him out now.”

“I told him I use Google Maps. He didn’t even crack a smile!”

Tao-Yi laughs. “He’s good at his job, though. Come in for an appointment?”

“No thanks – you lot can stay away from my virtual bits.”

Tao-Yi laughs again and turns towards the fire. Evelyn’s gaze wanders to Zach and stays there. The bonfire’s glow warms his tanned complexion, illuminating his gleaming black eyes and expressive mouth.

For a while, Tao-Yi watches Evelyn watching him. Then she slips away.

by Grace Chan (Verve Books) is the November 2025 read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.

If you could upload your mind to a virtual utopia, would you?

Grace Chan — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:30:31 +0000

“What does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space?”

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In , the characters face an impossible choice: upload your mind into a virtual utopia, or crumble away in the abandoned physical world. Mind-uploading is familiar to us as a science fiction trope, often anchoring relationship dramas and philosophical inquiry. But what does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space? Can the mechanics be extrapolated from our present-day science? And if you could do it, would you?

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At the heart of my novel, beneath the tender romance and the shiny technology, is a theoretical and philosophical problem: the Ship of Theseus paradox. The version recorded by Plutarch in the 1st century asks whether a ship that has been entirely replaced, piece by piece, remains the same ship. In the centuries to come, philosophers riffed on the original thought experiment. What if you gathered up all the original pieces of the ship – planks, oars, masts, sails – and built a second ship? Which ship, if either, is the true Ship of Theseus? The paradox forces us to draw a distinction between the material essence of a thing (wooden planks, neural circuits, molecules…) and our concept of its wholeness, its trueness. In Every Version of You, my character Navin, who decides to upload himself to Gaia, a virtual utopia, is our ship. Navin is a fork in the road. At the point of uploading, his physical and uploaded self are theoretically identical. But from that point onwards, the two potential Navins diverge and walk different paths. Virtual Navin is not what “Meatspace” Navin would have been, had he survived. I had to reverse-engineer the science of uploading to make it sound somewhat plausible. Some stories gloss over the mechanics so they can foreground other important elements: the relational, the philosophical, the satirical. The subject might place a device on their head or run an infusion through their veins and find themselves magically lifted out of their bodies into “the cloud”. Other stories address the science rigorously and viscerally. The depiction of a brain being consumed by laser scanning, slice by slice, in the television series Pantheon, leaves no ambiguity about the destruction of the embodied self. Exercising my writerly privileges, I bounced off neuroscientific foundations to hypothesise wildly in the realm of science fiction. At the time I was developing the novel, I was working in several neuropsychiatry units and studying for my psychiatry exams. (The recent of the 91av’s How to Think About series, exploring theories of consciousness, certainly would have come in handy during my research!) After reading about neural networks and connectomes, I began to imagine consciousness as an incredibly complex network of activity, with the patterns of activation varying from individual to individual. If those connections and their activation patterns could be replicated by a sufficiently advanced computer, then perhaps a copy of the mind could be created without any attachment to a physical body. The flip side of the coin, of course, is whether we will ever have sufficiently advanced computers to hold a human mind without information loss or degradation. When I gave early manuscripts of Every Version of You to friends, what struck me was the spectrum of reactions to uploading. Some were horrified. “You mean they killed off the originals?!” Others naturally took a more detached and philosophical leaning: if there is continuity of substance and subjectivity, what’s to say the uploaded person isn’t the same person? Would I upload to Gaia? My answer isn’t straightforward. In our intellectualistic society, we sometimes forget that we aren’t merely detached minds controlling fleshy appendages. We forget that the mind and the body are woven together in a complex tapestry – and more often than not, the body leads the dance. The gut, heart, skin, glands and vessels are in constant conversation with the brain.

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Beyond that, we are shaped by our external environment, by our attachments to others, by our relationship to nature. The psychoanalyst Esther Bick wrote about how our “psychic skin”, the container for our sense of internal self, arises from sensory experiences in early infancy. Sever our minds from our bodies, and something will be lost. In Every Version of You, uploading forces us to reckon with the insidious ways that technology consumes us. We let technology into our lives – into the intimate spaces of our homes, our bodies – because it’s convenient, shiny, fun, exciting. But who owns what we give over to technology? Who would own our uploaded minds? I hope that I would hold out against uploading for a long time, to find a different way of living on Earth. But I can’t say for sure what I would do in the end. If all my loved ones were in Gaia, it would be difficult to resist the lure. Grace Chan is the author of (Verve Books), the November 2025 read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.

Grace Chan, Author at 91av

Book Club: Read an extract from Every Version of You by Grace Chan

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If you could upload your mind to a virtual utopia, would you?

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