Synopsis:
In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-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, preferring instead to indulge in memories of her 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.
Review:
The world outside your home is dying. The sun will burn you in minutes, the pollution is so bad you need to wear a breathing filter, and plants? A distant memory. You spend your life in a VR world. You work, socialise and even eat inside Gaia. Some day you will have the chance to upload your brain into Gaia forever and say goodbye to your mortal body. Would you do it?
That is the question Tao-Yi is faced with in this brilliant novel. A compelling main character, her struggle with the decision to join her partner and her friends as they ‘upload’ one by one, or to stay in reality, is written so, so well.
I empathised very strongly with Tao-Yi here. As a millennial, I grew up offline and do feel pulled between that life and the incredibly digital world embraced by today’s younger generations, and this novel really unsettled me with its discussions. It holds a mirror up to our world and asks us to think about what we are doing with tech and what it means to be truly alive as humans.
We also have underlying themes of grief and loss in the face of change, and of course, the catastrophic destruction of the planet. The whole novel handled its topics incredibly well – Chan writes with such thought and care.
I found the entire book incredibly convincing. Not only was it all too easy to imagine such a digital future, but it was also not that hard to imagine the huge shifts in society’s acceptance of what is to come. This novel was absolutely fantastic, and honestly, I am still collecting my thoughts on it a couple of weeks later. Highly, highly recommend.
Congratulations to Grace Chan for making it onto the shortlist of the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize.
Pages of Emma 
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