Review: Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares

Title: Welcome to Forever

Author: Nathan Tavares

Length: 435 Pages

Category: Sci-Fi

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to carry a story this big and characters this vibrant around in my head. For Nathan Tavares to be able to get them from his imagination onto the page is a stunning achievement to me, someone who could never dream this vividly let alone translate it into words.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Fox is a memory editor – one of the best – gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe.

Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over.

As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Total Recall. Severance. Each of these have something in common with Nathan Tavares’s brilliant Welcome to Forever. They are each stories of what happens when technology advances to the point that minds and memories and perceptive realities are altered. Whether that is to the benefit or detriment of humanity is the depth and breadth of this story, and I don’t mind saying I spent the latter half of the reading begging this book not to hurt me. It leaves off emotionally at the threshold of happiness, and that promise was everything I needed.

Welcome to Forever left me in awe of its design to draw me into the story, thinking I understood what was happening only to discover I had no idea what was real and what wasn’t a fabrication embedded in a bit of memory code. The beauty is that it was both reality and unreality, and the esoterica is revealed as the characters take readers along on a journey that melds their mission with a love story that defies all artificial attempts to thwart it. Fox and Gabe come back to each other time and time again, only to continue the negative behaviors that forever doomed them. There is a lesson for each of them in the revelations of their shared pasts, and their enlightenment, while not perfect, is encouraging.

I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to carry a story this big and characters this vibrant around in my head. For Nathan Tavares to be able to get them from his imagination onto the page is a stunning achievement to me, someone who could never dream this vividly let alone translate it into words. I was enthralled by and invested in this book from page one to done. It’s a story that not only made me feel but made me think about the morality of intention, if those intentions are good but not particularly ethical, and what love means in all its perfect imperfections.