5 Questions with Grace Chan
Grace Chan is a speculative fiction writer and doctor. Her writing explores brains, minds, technology, space, and narrative identity. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and many other places.
She has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards, the Norma K Hemming Award, and Viva la Novella. The other version of Grace works in psychiatry. She has a longstanding interest in psychology, neuroscience, consciousness, empathy, ethics, and the mind-body relationship. Every Version of You is her first novel.
No.1
Your previous work been shortlisted for speculative fiction awards, and have written many short stories in recent years. Can you tell us what made you do the leap to a full novel, and what seeded the idea for Every Version of You?
Honestly, I was rather clueless about writing at the time. I wanted to write both short and long fiction, and didn’t know much about the differences in craft for either. Every Version of You came to me as the kernel of a short story: two people who love each other deeply, but are pulled in different directions by their responses to a technology that transforms humanity.
Looking back, I can see that I was contemplating a lot of things about identity and relationships and technology. What stitches us together into a single person when we have multiple, changeable identities? What makes relationships valuable and hallowed when they are transient? How do we each find subjective, personal meaning in our lives, especially when our world is becoming increasingly overwhelming, superficial, and divided?
No.2
Writing spec fic is a very specialised genre. How did you first get into writing speculative fiction stories, and how has it evolved through time?
I’ve always been incredibly nerdy, and I’ve loved speculative fiction of all kinds since I was a child. When I started writing, most of it instinctively had speculative elements—scientific hypotheticals, ghosts and spirits, the evocative vastness of space. For me, it’s the perfect combination of art and science. You get to play with a technical concept in detail, but make it human, relevant, resonant. I don’t think I could not write speculative fiction—it’s the most exciting space to work in!
There’s a common misperception that speculative fiction is less serious, meaningful, and ‘literary’, and, in my few years of writing, I’ve certainly experienced a divide between mainstream and speculative writing worlds. This still doesn’t make sense to me. Literary writing often has speculative elements, and speculative fiction is often subtle and experimental and complex.
I’ve always written without those genre concepts in mind. I try to read broadly, not only speculative fiction, and similarly try not to limit myself in my writing. I can write about an ethnographer trying to understand a soundless alien language, or genetically spliced children in 22nd century Hong Kong, or a young man trying to reconnect with his deceased father through an AI reconstruction—and they can all be worthwhile stories.
No.3
Do you want to talk about what you see as the role of fiction in processing reality? What role do you think speculative fiction plays in regular life?
Oh, I love this question. On a personal level, fiction allows me to process my own reality. Like many other writers, I write to sort out my thoughts and feelings about everything. As you write and rewrite, you come a little closer to a knowledge that’s buried within you—something you can never fully pin down, but you keep approaching and wrestling with, presenting it in successive forms that are hopefully less imperfect each time. I think I also write to make myself feel real. Throughout my life, I’ve shaped myself to blend in; I’ve lost touch with my own opinions and voice. Writing is therefore a form of rebirth, a way to incarnate myself.
I think fiction, including speculative fiction, paradoxically helps us face our realities. It’s easy to go through life without purposeful introspection, empathy, and reworking our biases. It’s only with awareness that we can choose how we respond to the world around us. Fiction gives you the distance to see things more clearly. That can be through allegory or metaphor, or the underestimated power of empathy, of seeing through another person’s eyes.
Fiction can also be powerfully escapist or cathartic, especially for people who’ve experienced significant hardship or injustice. We often use the term escapism negatively, but it’s neither good nor bad in and of itself. If it invokes imagination and creative play, then I think that’s important. And when fiction centres narratives that are different from the homogenous mainstream, that’s one of its most important roles.
No.4
You manage to weave many themes (diasporic longing, the tension between the online and the offline, class) into Every Version of You, which a reviewer has noted is ‘literary in its attention to the facets of a life’. Can you tell us a little about your world-building process?
Oh dear, I’m not sure I have a process. I usually start with an idea, and then characters, and then the world grows around them. What I really enjoyed about writing a novel was that I got to embody my characters at a bone-deep level. Although I started off consciously thinking about their personality traits, by the time I was rewriting the novel for the third or fourth time, I knew them intuitively.
With Every Version of You, it was fun but difficult to world-build. I extrapolated from my scientific/medical background and my own experiences of technology—the feeling of being subsumed into virtual spaces and algorithms, the boundlessness of digital space, the way you forget your body. I wanted to make the virtual world feel immersive and believable. Problem-solving each technicality (for instance, the ‘problem’ of immortality) made the story richer, in the end. There were lots of inconsistencies to iron out—luckily, I had an excellent editor!
No.5
Who are your favourite speculative fiction writers in Australia?
Lately I’ve been reading Angela Meyer, Melissa J. Ferguson, Claire G. Coleman. [And] there are many talented Australian writers in genre spaces: Elaine Cuyegkeng, DK Mok, Thoraiya Dyer, and Geneve Flynn have some wonderful short fiction pieces; Shelley Parker-Chan’s queer fantasy retelling of the rise of the Ming Dynasty is marvellous. And, although she’s not strictly speculative fiction, I’ll always shout about how much I love the short story collections of Elizabeth Tan.
(credit: Natasha Horvat)
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.
Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in, this is speculative literary fiction at its best.
Get it from Affirm Press here, or at all good bookstores.