Grace Chan’s debut novel, Every Version of You, opens with a scene that is as dazzling as it is disquieting: two lovers log into a hyper–real virtual playground while their physical world crumbles outside. Below, you’ll find a closer look at that opening passage, along with context, thematic insights, and points for reflection—perfect for anyone joining the New Scientist Book Club or simply curious about this near-future tale.
Setting the Scene
The novel begins in late-21st-century Melbourne, a city stifled by toxic heatwaves, socioeconomic fracture, and environmental collapse. In contrast, the digital realm named Chrysalis glitters with sensory perfection. Through a full-body neurointerface, users leave behind drought-cracked sidewalks and filtered air to roam cloud gardens, sip algorithmically balanced coffees, and sculpt the very physics around them. The opening extract plunges readers into this manufactured paradise, capturing the heady rush of embodied VR and foreshadowing its seductive power.
Meet Tao-Yan and Navin
• Tao-Yan (often called Tao) is a medical student raised between Malaysian heritage and Australian suburbia. She enters Chrysalis cautiously, wary of losing the tactile messiness that makes life real.
• Navin is her partner and a talented digital sculptor. For him, Chrysalis is both studio and sanctuary—an infinite canvas where creativity isn’t shackled by gravity or scarcity.
Their relationship grounds the story: two people navigating love, identity, and mortality while technologies promise to rewrite all three.
A Dying World, a Perfect Mirage
The excerpt juxtaposes decaying Melbourne with the luminous halls of Chrysalis. Chan’s prose leans into contrasts: harsh sunlight bleaching real-world streets versus virtual dawns coded to golden ratios of warmth; the scratch of a recycled paper mask against skin versus simulated breezes laced with nostalgia triggers. The effect is immediate: readers feel why citizens might abandon corporeal existence for digital transcendence.
The Ethical Quandary
Beneath the sensory spectacle lies an ethical question: if technology can preserve consciousness in a flawless simulation, what happens to the value of physical life? The opening passage plants early seeds of tension—especially for Tao, whose mother’s neurodegenerative illness raises stakes around permanence, memory, and the cost of “uploading.”
Key Themes Introduced in the Extract
1. Embodiment vs. Disembodiment: Chrysalis offers limitless form-shifting avatars. Yet Tao clings to the texture of sweat and heartbeat. How much of our humanity rests in the body?
2. Socioeconomic Divide: Full neural integration is expensive; the privileged bail out of climate catastrophe while others endure it. The novel hints at digital feudalism.
3. Identity Multiplicity: “Every Version” suggests that each login, each avatar skin, spawns a parallel self. The extract teases Navin’s fascination with iterating his identity, contrasting with Tao’s dread of fragmentation.
4. Love Under Techno-Pressure: When partners occupy different relationships to technology, intimacy can fracture. The opening lines already showcase subtle friction between Tao’s caution and Navin’s fervor.
Discussion Questions for Your Book Club
• In the extract, which sensory detail of Chrysalis most vividly conveyed its allure?
• Can love stay intact when two people choose different ontological paths—one bodily, one virtual?
• How does Chan’s depiction of climate collapse reflect real-world anxieties, and does Chrysalis function as escapism or adaptive evolution?
• Would you upload if given Navin’s opportunity? Why or why not?
Final Thoughts
Chan’s opening passage doesn’t merely paint a pretty simulation—it interrogates the cost of utopia. Every shimmering fountain in Chrysalis is mirrored by dust-choked streets outside. As you continue reading, notice how the author uses sensory overload to probe deeper questions of consciousness, class, and care. The temptation to log off from reality, she suggests, might be humanity’s greatest triumph—or its final surrender.
