Overview

In late-twenty-first-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, 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, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier 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.

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9780857309150

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Reviews

Visceral, mind-bending and tender -- INGA SIMPSON, Author of The Last Woman in the World With an intriguing blend of cli-fi, philosophy of mind and transhumanist themes, Grace Chan's novel delivers striking science fiction steeped in absurdity and dystopian menace * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD * It's like Ready Player One meets Station Eleven and Ex Machina, and it's the book I can't stop thinking about this year * TIME OUT * Confronting what might one day be left on a ruined, 'offline' Earth is a powerful way to refocus the lens on the world we are presently creating, and the politics informing what we build - whether it's from bricks or code * GUARDIAN * A meditative, gorgeous, endlessly imaginative take on the future of virtual reality and what it means to be human, as well as a deeply tender story of love and the immigrant experience... A transcendent debut -- GRACE D LI, author of Portrait of a Thief

Draw two timelines: the relentless degradation of the planet along one; a seamless interface with utopian digital space along the other. This disturbing, unflinching and emotionally-charged story explores the point of convergence * DAILY MAIL * It's like Ready Player One meets Station Eleven and Ex Machina, and it's the book I can't stop thinking about this year * TIME OUT * Confronting what might one day be left on a ruined, 'offline' Earth is a powerful way to refocus the lens on the world we are presently creating, and the politics informing what we build - whether it's from bricks or code * GUARDIAN * With an intriguing blend of cli-fi, philosophy of mind and transhumanist themes, Grace Chan's novel delivers striking science fiction steeped in absurdity and dystopian menace * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD * A meditative, gorgeous, endlessly imaginative take on the future of virtual reality and what it means to be human, as well as a deeply tender story of love and the immigrant experience... A transcendent debut -- GRACE D LI, author of Portrait of a Thief

Draw two timelines: the relentless degradation of the planet along one; a seamless interface with utopian digital space along the other. This disturbing, unflinching and emotionally-charged story explores the point of convergence * DAILY MAIL * Quietly brilliant... a clever and thoughtful novel that sprawls out of its tightly observed, intimate beginnings into a big-picture look at humanity's future * NEW SCIENTIST * It's like Ready Player One meets Station Eleven and Ex Machina, and it's the book I can't stop thinking about this year * TIME OUT * Confronting what might one day be left on a ruined, 'offline' Earth is a powerful way to refocus the lens on the world we are presently creating, and the politics informing what we build - whether it's from bricks or code * GUARDIAN * With an intriguing blend of cli-fi, philosophy of mind and transhumanist themes, Grace Chan's novel delivers striking science fiction steeped in absurdity and dystopian menace * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD *

Author Information

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.

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