Welcome to Forever

by Nathan Tavares

Overview

A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution.

For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803360409
Publisher:	Titan
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	219,391
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.79(h) x 1.04(d)

About the Author

Nathan Tavares is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in the Portuguese-American community of southeastern Massachusetts and developed a love for fantastical stories at an early age, from superheroes to mythology. He studied English in college and received his MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His editorial work celebrates queer culture and historically excluded communities, with pieces appearing in GQ, Out, and elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2024

Tavares (A Fractured Infinity) confounds in this jam-packed mind-bender set in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–style world where memories can be altered and erased. Professional memory editor Fox was employed by mega-company NIL/E to code better memories for his customers. Then came the terror attack that killed his husband, Gabe. The trauma leaves Fox with amnesia, so he checks into the Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction, hoping to regain what he lost. However, when the memories slowly begin to return to Fox, he realizes he was a “selfish, controlling asshole” to Gabe and discovers some shocking revelations that cause him to question his reality. From the start, it’s hard to keep track of all the tech that goes into editing people’s brains, and as more levels of memory and reality are exposed, things become even more slippery. While Tavares asks intriguing questions about what’s essential to humanity, there’s too much clutter to be able to think clearly about the answers. This is tough to get a handle on. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Tavares’s worldbuilding is complex and fascinating in this kaleidoscope of a novel. The high-stakes science fiction is sharp and tragic, hopeful and thrilling." -Library Journal

"Tavares is fast becoming my favourite SF writer. Welcome to Forever is a masterful futuristic love story, absorbing and all too real."
Kaaron Warren, award winning author of Into Bones Like Oil

"Tavares reminds us that no matter how far technology advances, human connection will always bind us. This is a sharp and aching portrait of love painted with a deft hand."
Al Hess


"A hugely impressive feat of layered narratives and big ideas, told with an even bigger heart. I couldn't put it down."
Stark Holborn


"A thrilling vision of the future and a poignant tale of love and marriage, Welcome to Forever is impossible to forget. Tavares keenly engages with contemporary conversations about immortality and identity, and weaves a heartbreakingly beautiful story about the lengths people go for the ones they love."
Victor Manibo


"In Welcome to Forever, Tavares does what all great writers of science fiction do best. He takes our hopes, fears and anxieties about the way we live today, skewers them to the page and makes the reader watch, helpless and captivated as they wriggle underneath his touch. Whether he's probing the ethics - or absence thereof - in techno-capitalism, questioning whether the growing mental health industrial complex can really heal our minds and spirits or simply reminding us that it's often harder to keep love than find it, he finds way to bridge big ideas with the truths of human nature on every page. Welcome to Forever is a work of artistic maturity, dazzling imagination and a horrible sense of foresight over what might come to pass - if we let it happen."
Chris McCrudden, author of the Battlestar Suburbia series




PRAISE FOR NATHAN TAVARES


"A very beautiful, tender portrait of a romance, its unremarkable mundanity made precious against the backdrop of so many iterations...It’s a delightful, spiraling, idiosyncratic book that uses the language and techniques of filmmaking to structure a more interesting reading experience." - The New York Times


"A powerful and touching love story."
The Times


"Populated by some of the best sci-fi has to offer ... The multiverse trope offers and easy and entertaining vehicle for very deep philosophical lessons about what it takes to grow up at any age."
New Scientist


"A delightfully narrated tale of love at any cost, A FRACTURED INFINITY is as fun as it is heartfelt." - Megan O'Keefe, author of Velocity Weapon and more


"With a narrative voice full of charm and punch, gripping from page one, the story unpeels layers of Hayes’s life while painting a hopeful near-future Earth. The cozy pace ramps to a dazzling finale exploring the resilience of entangled time and the malleability of morality when love is on the line and power free at hand. A wonderful debut perfect for fans of ARRIVAL and THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS.” - Essa Hansen, Nophek Gloss, Orbit 2020


“A cinematic rollercoaster ride … but the real beating heart of the novel is the compelling gay love story that I will remember for a long time: brilliant, flawed, multi-layered and beautifully human.”
Emmi Itäranta, author of The Moonday Letters


“Both poignant and thrilling … it's a multifaceted jewel, with humanity's flaws at its heart.”
Stark Holborn, author of Ten Low and Hel’s Eight


“Razor sharp prose, this complex, intelligent novel is ultimately empowering.” 
Kaaron Warren, author of Slights and more


"A Fractured Infinity is a heartfelt and haunting journey through the multiverse, with a clever, compelling narrative voice and a love story that shatters the boundaries between realities."
Ren Hutchings, author of Under Fortunate Stars
 
“Unboxing a puzzle-box crush in an alternate universe … an idiosyncratic take on the ever-expanding multiverse genre.”
Nikhil Singh, author of Club Ded


'Tavares hits the gas, sending the plot rocketing through dozens of fascinating possible Earths. The epic love story forms an intense emotional core and Hayes’s conversational narration charms. Anyone looking for queer sci-fi should check this out.'—Publishers Weekly 


"Tavares’s prose is dense, chewy, packed with one idea after another as he deftly builds not just one possible future world but dozens, all without ever losing sight of the most important thread: Hayes’s love for Yusuf."
SFX


"It’s this juxtaposition of real-life relationships and ground-breaking technology that makes the novel shine."—GeekDad


"This is a compelling, unconventional debut that is too freaking awesome to be a debut; a book that’s easy to read, but hard to recover from."
Every Book a Doorway


"An engaging and enthralling story filled with interesting characters and ideas that was hard to put down."
Set the Tape


"Fast-paced and thrilling."
Tea Leaf Reads


"A multiversal love-story, a genre savvy sci-fi with a strong emotional core."
Writings of a Doomscribe


"Nathan Tavares is interested chiefly in weaving a powerful and touching love story between two very different, flawed, engaging men. He succeeds handsomely."
The Times


"Tavares’s prose is dense, chewy, packed with one idea after another as he deftly builds not just one possible future world but dozens, all without ever losing sight of the most important thread: Hayes’s love for Yusuf."
SFX

From the Publisher

02/01/2024

Fox is a memory editor who has lost his own memories after getting caught up in a neuro-terrorist bomb. His husband, Gabe, didn't survive the blast, and Fox checks himself into the Field of Reeds Centre for Memory Reconstruction in order to recover his memories and bring Gabe back, no matter the cost. Fox begins to access his memories from before the bomb but struggles to integrate the excerpts with his current reality. He finds himself pulled into an underground movement to solve the code that caused the memory virus and to locate Khadija Banks, the mother of memory editing, who disappeared years ago. Fox travels deeper and deeper into his memorystream in his obsessive quest to save Gabe and the rest of the world and starts to unravel as the edits to his memory are finally discovered. The race to save humanity from warring powers is compelling, but Fox's relationships with Gabe and himself truly drive the story. VERDICT Tavares's (A Fractured Infinity) worldbuilding is complex and fascinating in this kaleidoscope of a novel. The high-stakes science fiction is sharp and tragic, hopeful and thrilling.—Maria Martin

Library Journal