Grace Chan’s first novel opens in Melbourne in the late 2080s. The planet is, to not put too fine a point on it, “spent”. Most people who can afford it spend their mornings climbing into gel-filled pods to log into a fun, more beautiful edition of Earth called Gaia, where advanced coding offers the sensation (or at least, a sensation) of taste, smell and even touch. The book’s central quartet, Tao-Yi and her boyfriend Navin, and their friends Zach and Evelyn, live so much of their lives there that when the technology arrives to allow full “upload”, it feels like a foregone conclusion. Except for Tao-Yi, it isn’t.
Is her reluctance just nostalgia? What, exactly, is she worried about leaving behind? In digitalising the mind-body problem, Every Version of You transposes it into a literal and very material question: if you could leave your body, would you? In his unsettling 1909 story, The Machine Stops, EM Forster comes at this question from the other side: if you could return to the physical world, would you? In Forster’s story, a woman lives contentedly in her small pod below the earth, washed, dried and fed while she swaps “elevated” ideas with like minds in other pods around the world. All her needs are met by the Machine. Her son’s claustrophobia merely annoys her – she thinks he is a stubborn and backward heretic. He thinks the Machine has robbed humanity of “the sense of space and of the sense of touch”. The story’s very bleak ending is easily read – especially coming from EM “only connect” Forster – as tech-phobic. A century and a bit later, Chan’s relationship to cyberspace is understandably more ambiguous.
