This is a mind blowing sci-fi novel about saved consciousness, artificial realities and edited memories, spun around an Achillean second chance romance.
When Fox wakes up in the Field of Reed Centre for Memory Reconstruction, he has no idea how he got there. From his therapists he learns that he was a victim of a terrorist bombing by memory editing pioneer turned revolutionary Khadija Banks, and that his husband was one of the victims whose archived memories were also lost in the attack.
As Fox works on reconstructing his memories from the fragments that remain, he quickly realises that his world is unreliable, and he can’t know who to trust. Going through endless iterations of meeting, falling in love with, and breaking up with Gabe, Fox digs into his past and into his connection to Khadija to save Gabe. And saving Gabe might just be the key to saving humanity.
Having read and loved A Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares, I had high expectations for his sophomore novel Welcome to Forever. And I was not disappointed. This is sci-fi of the more static variety, and for a large part of the novel the plot evolves around discoveries within the retrieved memory fragments. We follow events from Fox’ point of view, which is as reliable as can be expected from a patient with severe memory loss. I loved discovering new facets of Fox and Gabe’s relationship as we went through memories of cycles of their relationship, and as the story progressed, the impact of memory editing on the reliability of our narrator became clear. This was not an easy read in the sense that I felt I needed to be very switched on to keep up with the plot, but it was a rewarding read and one that will stay with me for a long time.

This book is a unique encounter of memory and what matters. It transcribes a perspective that seems ever shifting and discovering. A great way to embrace imagination.

My true rating is a 4.5, but I’ll happily round it up to 5 for this purpose. What a wild ride! When done right, I’m a big fan of an unreliable narrator, and this book got it right. In the best way possible, I didn’t understand what was truly happening as Fox went through this dark, emotional journey back to himself, and when the revelation happened in the third act, my mind was blown! I loved the second-chance romance and was definitely satisfied by the ending.

"We are sparks. Our experiences, our memories, are electrochemical impulses dancing from neuron to neuron, across the synaptic divide. These impulses may be mapped and influenced, written and sung out in epics. We are stories."

— Aset, Philosophies of Memory and Laws of Applied Sahusynics, First Edition

★★

Expected to be devastated, shaken, transformed. Anything but...bored? Welcome to Forever gives us the promise of an emotionally charged narrative à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on memory, the endurance of love, etc etc but ultimately this book could not deliver. The voice of the writing and also the spatterings of humor was just too quirky at times for my personal taste. Some phrases like "We are memories, and memories are we" instead of coming across as profound just sounded like the author was trying too hard to be clever. Reading this book, I was reminded of the also recently released Prophet by Sin Blaché, another sci-fi story focusing on memory, as both could not really live up to their incredible premises.

Welcome to Forever sadly was not for me, but I do see how some other readers may be able to enjoy this book.

I have been looking for new sci-fi reads to add to our Library and this is definitely top of my list. Raw, inspiring, adventurous and captivating.

Epic sf about archived consciousness, the virtual afterlife, with lots of feelings, reexamining a failed marriage.

This was one of my rare netgalley requests, thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the opportunity, my opinions are still unbiased (or just biased in the sense that I chose to read this because it sounded like my cup of tea. I had liked the author's <a href=https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6284448461>writing before</a and the blurb sounded fascinating so I actually went looking for it).

It lived up to expectations while being full of surprises. In a future just a couple of generations in the future, a company invented and now controls personality archive (and editing), and as a result for their clients death has ended - just jump your consciousness to a new body. One of their memory editors finds himself amnesiac in memory rehab after a terrorist attack, and is particularly trying to remember his husband and his failing marriage...It is complex, borderline confusing but with a thread of feeling and some authorial handholding throughout, full of surprises and twists, and that big senseofwunda in the consequences and details of the worldbuilding. Lots of references to egyptian mythological parallels to our consciousness archiving and death destroying company, and lots of themes woven throughout.

The ending is interesting, rather open - made me think and I do like it a lot after thinking. I would love to talk about it to other readers but basically it feels right.

As criticism, I did think it was a tad too long but it never was boring, always action or feelings to catch my attention. It's very very good and and it feels very fresh and original. I am putting his other novel on my wishlist now!

Incidentally I read the e-ARC (things might change in the text and all) and I loved the book design work, both the cover and typesetting, it was already impeccable and beautiful. Good work on the book production.

I generally love sci-fi and love stories with heavy LGBTAIAP+ presentation. I can honestly say that Welcome to Forever is a perfect combination of these. It’s dark, hopeless, emotional, raw and inspiring in equal parts. The first thing I loved was Gabe and Fox. They are painfully human with their flaws, their relationship is not perfect or a fairytale but because of this it feels all the more real, and ultimately genuine.

At it’s heart Welcome to Forever is a love story about Gabe and Fox but it is so much more. There are numerous timelines or rather scenarios created by editing memories and sometimes erasing parts completely. This is another area where the novel excels since it begins to ask the question if you could forget or edit memories would you and at what point on that journey do you lose who you are and become someone else, another version of the person you once were.

The writing is beautiful and emotive. While I didn’t initially like Fox I quickly became invested in his journey and wanting to know what happened next. The plot and story are so tightly woven and while we meet multiple Fox’s and Gabe’s I never lost track of what was happening.

In short this was an amazing novel and it get’s extra points for a character sharing my name, even if she was only a side character.

What do you trust when you can't trust your own memories? What's worth living for if you can live forever and have every experience you can possibly think of inserted into your mind? What is to love when your partner has been shattered into a million shards and you have to put him back together again, piece by piece? These are the questions Nathan Tavares grapples with in his novel 'Welcome to Forever'. It's billed as a romance, but it's more of a techno-thriller with shades of Neuromancer in a world where memories are freely edited and people can live forever by transferring consciousness from one body to another. A thin veneer of utopia papering over a world bent towards the deletion of all that makes us human.

Our avenue into this world, Fox, has been psychologically injured in an unknown attack, facing amnesia and the presumable death of his husband. It's an engaging mystery box, as we learn more about the world as Fox does, slowly reliving his memories and piecing together what's happened and what could happen. But Fox is also the ultimate unreliable narrator, as is every character: how much can we trust each muddled memory?

There's plenty of parallels to be drawn between this world and the Matrix, and with Severance, and I even felt a similarity to Assassin's Creed (there's an Animus like device allowing characters to relive memories). Tavares weaves together the past and the present, the real and the unreal, to keep us guessing at Fox's true background, motivations and role in the bigger narrative happening around him. There's a lot going on, and it can get a little confusing and overwhelming at times to keep track of whose memories we are inside of and what relevance they have to the story.

My main criticism was with the character(s?) of Gabe. He was too much of a bully and a jock for me to really care about. I couldn't see what Fox saw in him other than lusting after his body. There's a depth and complexity to the relationship, with a realistic harshness of two people who want to be together but probably shouldn't. However, there wasn't enough for me to buy into romance aspects of the novel. The sci-fi elements were fantastic and were what kept me reading.

When the book opens, the mc Fox is in a memory rehab center because he has forgotten everything and they lost the backups. Since we follow Fox’s pov, we also understand basically nothing. This made the first 30-40% very slow but I'm begging you to keep going after that- I did the rest in one sitting. Fox, and his husband Gabe, felt kinda irritating and incomprehensible to me at first. I didn't understand why Fox would want to get back with Gabe. Well it turns out I don't think Fox knew either and if you give both of these characters time to learn and remember, you will start to understand them. And even then neither of them are perfect people. But they're working on that.

One of the strengths of this book for me is that the author really sat down and asked what the world would look like if we had this ability to edit and download and delete memories. Every time some new editing deluxe concept was explained I was like yeah ok of COURSE capitalism would create that. It becomes an interesting discussion on the intersections of innovation and consumerism and the evils of governments and corporations when they can just edit people and worlds and treat workers as disposable.

Anyway this book is filled with so many plot twists and reworkings, mostly because that's how this premise operates. The story unfolds slowly and nonlinearly. It's worth your time if you have the patience and the brain power to let it unfold. And I think Tavares does a great job of tying up the ends for you, once you get there, so don't feel left in the dirt if you don't understand something the first time you see it. I was constantly picking pieces apart and explaining it to my spouse to try to understand.

If you like Blade Runner or Ghost in The Shell or Matrix and but you wish they were about a dysfunctional gay couple instead then boy oh boy do I have the book for you.

As someone who reads quite a bit of scifi as well as queer fiction, I have become familiar with a lot of the tropes and narrative structures that tend to drive both genres. As such, it is not often I find myself at a loss for predicting how a plot may progress, even in the most minor of ways. Welcome to Forever was so completely unique and outside the realm of anything I had read before that I was pleasantly shocked to find myself blissfully disorientated.
The concept of being able to edit human consciousness and memory with lines of code and the ramifications, stagnation, and destruction brought on by that technology is one I found fascinating. Following Fox as he attempts to piece together his own feelings and thoughts of who he’s being told he was in the wake of his amnesia was a very trippy and eye-opening experience, but it was also an incredible vehicle to drive home this idea of self-improvement and learning through mistakes and embracing all facets of failure and emotion.
Normally, I don’t like stories where amnesia and day to day repetition are centre points. However, it definitely worked in this case because the non-linear and sometimes mutable flashbacks helped to throw the reader into the same sense of confusion that was affecting the characters.
Ultimately, Welcome to Forever was very slow-paced and slightly confusing, but it was also strange and amazing in its individuality. I highly recommend it if you’re into psychological mysteries.

Thank you so much to @Netgalley and @titanbooks for this ARC.

Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares is set in a dystopian future where a person’s memories can be edited, uploaded, and rehoused into different bodies. The novel follows Fox, a memory editor, who is struggling to regain his own memory from a recent terrorist attack. In that same attack, Fox has lost his husband, Gabe - whose memory file has been obliterated.
Swipe right for the blurb!

I am a huge science fiction/fantasy guy, so having a science fiction novel that centers around a queer protagonist was amazing to see. It definitely gave me Altered Carbon vibes with the uploading of your ‘consciousness’ and the elimination of a permanent death. There are also a lot of plot elements around coding and reading code which definitely made me think of The Matrix.

I enjoyed this novel so much! The timeline jumps around a lot and the narratives are intentionally disjointed. It can be a little disorienting at first, but by the end of the story - everything comes together in the perfect puzzle. I thought Tavares did an exceptional job of tying up loose ends and creating a realized and established world/future.

The characters of Fox and Gabe are also really well written. They are real and flawed and not great people, but throughout the novel you see their growth and their motivations and the reasons why they are the way that they are. Fox was initially a character I wasn’t really rooting for, but with his growth and as more of the story is revealed, I started to feel for his struggle and his journey.

This one really got me thinking, too - especially with the idea of editing memory. Like, what would you remove from your memory if you could? Or how would you alter experiences to make them more memorable? If that were possible - I’m not sure I would want to change my past, or rather - my perspective of the past. It’s trippy to think about and I love books that make me do that!

I would definitely recommend this one if you enjoy science fiction! I also want to check out Nathan Tavares’ other work, too - A Fractured Infinity!

Would you have your memories altered, if you could?

Oh my goodness this book broke my heart! I read Nathan Tavares' Fractured Infinity and loved it. I couldn't wait to read his second novel Welcome to Forever.

We follow Fox who has lost his memories and more importantly his husband Gabe. Slowly but surely as Fox figures out what happens so do we. It took me a while to get into Welcome to Forever but once the plot kicked in I couldn't put it down!

I will keep reading Nathan Tavres I adore how he explores grief, time travel and most importantly love.

In the world of this novel, people’s memories – and, essentially, their consciousness - are uploaded starting in childhood, and can be downloaded into a new body whenever they like. People can custom-order bodies for themselves – younger, or with modifications, etc. They can hire trainers to pop into their bodies and do their workouts for them. Essentially, anyone whose memories have been uploaded never has to die and can create their perfect life. Fox, our main character, is a memory editor, carving people’s memories into a more pleasant reality, cutting out traumas and adding in pleasant experiences that never really happened. But the novel starts in the aftermath of a disaster. A bomb has wiped out a huge section of memory storage. There was enough left of Fox for him to survive, but his husband Gabe’s memories were wiped out entirely. As Fox struggles to piece together his sense of self from the fragments of memory that survived the bombing, he discovers that nothing, from the rehabilitation center where he’s recuperating to the bombing itself, is as it appears.

I was confused a lot while reading this. I had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around the ins and outs of the worldbuilding at the beginning, and there were things throughout that I felt like I never totally understood why they happened, though with most confusing things if I hung in there it would eventually be made clear.

The world of this novel is, as you might have guessed, dystopian as hell. In some ways it reminds me a little of the before-times in the Oryx and Crake series.

It’s fascinating how Fox – and the reader’s perception of him, and of his relationship with Gabe – evolve over the course of the book, as he unlocks the truth about his own past. At the beginning, I didn’t like Fox at all, and was not sure why he and Gabe were even together – which was confusing, as this book was touted as a love story. But by the end, I was fully won over. Theirs is really a beautiful story. And the writing in this book is absolutely gorgeous to boot, with an intricate, almost mystery-like trajectory as truths are slowly unveiled. I really enjoyed this novel – it's absolutely worth fighting through any initial confusion to get to the good stuff.

Representation: POC characters, LGBTQ+ characters

CW: exploitation of children

This book took me a very long time to read -- but that's not a bad thing. Being a review copy I didn't have the strength of other reviews or other reviewers to tell me to stick with the book and it was worth it. I have ADHD so sometimes if a book is a little slow to start then I can pick it up and put it down a lot before it gets me. It's a long book, but I don't think it's any longer than it needed to be.

I'll say, until about 35-40% of the book I ate it in little nibbles, picking it up, reading a chapter, popping it down. From about 40% I needed to know what the hell was happening and how it was going to end. I devoured the book from that point and don't regret the hours lost to it.

It's a beautiful picture of a relationship in a fucked up world. The relationship is, well, real. This is not a genre romance, this isn't wrote from step A, to B, with the third act breakup and all. This is a very heavy sci-fi dystopian with a love story at it's heart. The relationship between two men driving them through the story and through, well, no spoilers.

If you switched this story for a straight couple would it work? No, some of the experiences would lose their depth and their commentary on the gay community. If you changed this story to be about something other than a relationship would it work? No, this story works for Fox and Gabe, but I'm not sure if it would work for anyone else. If you changed this story to dial down the sci-fi would it work? No, it's intrinsic to them, their stories and the... everything. This story needs every element in it and every element just the way they are, and that's something beautiful about it. There's nothing pasted on. There's nothing added just to tick a box, or get a label on Amazon or Goodreads.

So, if you love sci-fi and spec fic, read this. It's a treat.

4.5* rounded up. Pretend the epilogue doesn't exist.

This is a hard one to review. Mainly: wow. An impressively executed symphony of theme, plot, character and excellent writing. Inventive, unexpected, and profound. The general concept is technically similar to The Binding, but the tone of this novel is so different that it feels incredibly unique.
I was all set to laud this as one of my favourite books of the year... and then I read the final chapter. Without spoilers, all I can say is that it undermines the whole book. I'd strongly recommend not reading the epilogue; if the author cut this, he would be left with a perfect ending.
So, I'm knocking one star off for that coda, but it's still four stars for blowing my mind up to that point.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

I am 30% into the book and have decided not to read on. Welcome to Forever is beautifully written. The prose is strong and engaging. It touches on many interesting and thought provoking ideas about identity and memory and the dangers of misusing technology. Unfortunately, the world-building is both too vague and over-complicated, and eventually overwhelms the story and characters.

A third of the way in, there's a huge although somewhat predictable, shift in reality and it's at that point I lost the energy to continue reading. There wasn't enough narrative focus, nothing to draw me onwards. Fox, the protagonist, is an interesting character. I enjoy his snark and sarcasm. He's flawed and damaged enough to be interesting, even if I never grew emotionally attached to him. Gabe, his husband, on the other hand, is an emotionally distant cheater and I couldn't relate to Fox's guilt over betraying him or his need to get him back. Given the emotional centre of the novel focusses on that one goal, I never got emotionally invested in the story.

When the reality shift occurs, all the characters, including Fox, change gender and appearance. The novel hadn't previously established any of the secondary characters, or their relationship with Fox, enough to grab my interest, but the disorientation was still alienating. I wasn't motivated enough to do the work of figuring out who was who, and the narrative voice's lecture on why I shouldn't be bothered by the change in the characters' appearances and identities irritated me.

I wasn't intrigued enough by the whole Kadijah mystery plot line to force myself to read to the end to find out what it was all about. Kadijah herself was an annoying character who felt like a bunch of cliches sewn together, but not at all like a tech genius. More like a game show host.

Ultimately, I needed the romance aspect of this book to be far more powerful and effecting and I needed the world-building aspects to be clearer and more focussed. I'm sure this book will work well for other people, but it wasn't for me personally.

Well, this book was certainly an interesting read. The idea of memory therapy and memory editing makes a really exciting backdrop for a story that is fundamentally about two flawed men, always drawn together and yet always losing each other.

Gabe and Fox are perfect for each other, and yet they never are. The journey taht they go through together, both in the past and when Fox is piecing his memories back together is intense, romantic, fiery and full of hurt. They pull together, and push apart like two sides of a magnet, and it is a really great relationship to read.

I found the ending a little confusing, and I'm still not sure I understand what happened, but maybe that is the point.
Khadija felt like the weakest part of the story to me, somehow a genius, and yet so naive and unable to understand what her plan would do. Still, maybe that is the real nature of genius - blinded by your own goals?

Overall, this book is an exciting, and moving story of love in a time of disaster, and of rediscovering who you are, and who you can be. Go into it with an open mind, and I think you'll love it.

This was a book with a very interesting premise but ultimately fell flat for me due to a narrative structure that felt muddled rather than engaging.

It will be hard to describe what didn't work for me without spoilers, so this may wind up being a shorter review than I would have liked. This book had me thoroughly hooked for the first 50% as we meet Fox, learn about his job as a memory editor, and his recovery to get his memories back after a bombing on a memory center. The memory editing technology was intriguing and I liked that throughout the book we got increasingly detailed descriptions of how it worked. To me, the memory editing technology, and its positives, negatives, and its possible side effects, remain the most interesting part of the story.

After Fox's time at the memory center, we start to uncover some secrets, that do first seem intriguing. However, as they unravel more and more, I found that the narrative structure was made up of too may flashbacks to be able to develop a fully cohesive story in the present. I also started to care slightly less about Fox because what started as a character with a fully-fleshed and gripping motivation turned into something where his end goals were much less clear, so I was less invested in his character.

I debated for a really long time what rating I wanted to give to this book because of how much I liked the first half, and ultimately decided on a 2, because generally for a 3 star, it would be a book that I would be willing to recommend to someone else, and I don't think I would do that in this case.

I thoroughly enjoyed Nathan Tavares' 2022 debut novel, A Fractured Infinity, so I was eager to read this follow up. Sadly, after struggling to finish it, I have to conclude that Welcome to Forever is just not my cup of tea. While Fractured Infinity combined a love story with a fairly basic science fiction plot, this novel goes all in on the sci-fi, which baffled and frustrated me.

The book takes place on an exhausted, dying Earth. Fox is a memory editor, whose jobs at NIL/E Technologies involving erasing unpleasant memories from clients' brains and writing code so that entirely new (and always happy) memories can be inserted instead. His personal trainer husband, Gabe, can jump into clients' bodies and exercise for them so they look fit without the effort. In this brave new world, people can download their consciousness and plug it into a new body, forever averting final-death. But recently (maybe?) a bomb exploded near Fox's apartment, releasing a memory virus. Fox doesn't remember anything about his past, including Gabe. He finds himself at the Center for Memory Recovery, where he apparently checked himself in to recover his damaged "memory code" with the help of trained therapists.

That summary covers approximately 10% of the book. I'm not sure I could describe the other 90% even if I wanted to. The plot isn't linear, jumping from Fox's experiences at the Memory Center to flashes of the past that his brain is starting to remember. But some of the memories feel like they belong to someone else...okay, you officially lost me.

I struggled through discussions of memorystreams, mippers, sahusynics, and rez tech. Fox and Gabe are together. Now they're not. Now they're....other people? The Evil NIL/E Corporation, who operates all of this technology, is searching for Khadija Banks, pioneer of the technology turned revolutionary. But who are the true bad guys? Which parts of the narrative really happened, and which were dreams, fake memories, or something else? And, most importantly, what the hell does that ending mean?

The book raises seriously existential questions about whether we are more than the sum of our memories, but I couldn't comprehend Tavares' answers. I think if I tackled it again, I might get a clearer picture of what exactly was going on, but I'm not motivated enough to do so. YMMV if you are more of a sci-fi devotee instead of a casual (and befuddled) reader like me.

It’s been several years since I stayed up past my bedtime to finish a book in almost one sitting because I knew otherwise I’d be up thinking about it all night anyway - but that was the case with Welcome to Forever. I was utterly gripped by this book, which balances emotional reflection with some tense sci-fi twists and turns. There were points where I could feel my heart pounding. The characters are flawed, but you end up rooting for them by the end (sometimes against all reason). A brilliant read - both enjoyable, and gave me a lot to mull over.
4.5 rounded up to 5.