FOREVR

A cautionary tale rendered as a graphic novel and set in the not-too-distant future.

Penny is dying. While her husband, James, retreats into video games, their daughter, Brenda, focuses on building her brand as a wilderness influencer. When Penny finally dies, her survivors have very different reactions to the version of Penny that persists on the Forevr app. James’ marriage changes very little. In fact, the longer he lives with the virtual Penny, the more he treats her as a person—a process that involves purchasing accessories. Brenda, on the other hand, finds the very idea of Forevr abhorrent. A family camping trip leads to a violent clash with world-changing consequences. Brown assays deep questions about life, death, and personhood here, but he addresses none of them in a satisfying fashion. James is a nonentity. Brenda is just a jerk. The only character with any emotional complexity is Brenda’s girlfriend, and she grows flatter as the story progresses. Most detrimentally, Brown portrays Penny as a nag in both life and afterlife, but he never shows her addressing her own existential reality—neither as a flesh-and-blood human with a terminal illness nor as a collection of zeros and ones. Forevr Penny is a product of DNA and data from her phone. It’s easy to understand why James and Brenda have intense emotional responses to her online afterlife, but we don’t know how Penny understood the connection between these two iterations while she was still alive. Beyond that, there’s no suggestion that anyone in this world has wondered what DNA and cellphone data have to do with consciousness or about the actual relationship between a human who has died and their digital doppelgänger.

Dystopian fiction that barely explores the issues it raises.