Review: Upgrade

Upgrade by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gene editing is the name of the game, and clandestine gene labs are the meth labs of this future.

"If I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone was trying to turn you into a superhuman."

The story initially gave me a 'Flowers for Algernon' vibe. We meet Logan, an agent of the Genetic Protection Agency (GPA), recovering in hospital a month after he was intentionally infected with a Scythe virus during a bungled mission. As we get to know our protagonist they are undergoing a sort of similar awakening scenario, their mental capacity expanding rapidly with the infection and Logan must learn to control the incoming flow of new data. In this it's not so much about processing the information for the first time, but about processing much more information at once than ever before.

"Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay."

Stick your fingers in your eyes while you read the rest of this paragraph, if you want to avoid a tiny spoiler which is revealed super early in the book. It turns out that Logan's mad-scientist, evil-genius mum is alive, has been in hiding, and is responsible for infecting him with the Scythe upgrade. If you didn't see that coming you weren't reading this book, you were just looking at the words in it one after another. So obvious and yet, still intriguing.

Well the government? Or the GPA are aware of the set up and now they're pounding Logan for answers that he doesn't have. Seriously. They go from asking reasonable questions to asking things like "if your mum was continuing her work, would she need a tech guy?"... what? Yeah, sure?

"My mother was, by orders of magnitude, the most ambitious person I’d ever known. But surely even she wasn’t crazy enough to try to force a species upgrade on Homo sapiens."

As it turns out, Logan wasn't the only one to be infected with the forced genetic manipulation and we get a sort of battle of titanic wits as Logan tries to prevent the rest of humanity from being infected.

The story bounced along nicely at a brisk pace and although it regularly tested the limits of credulity it was still a high-fun, biopunk adventure.

“...maybe you’re just afraid of growing beyond the people you love.”

Logan's family and background are definitely challenges that he must understand and overcome as a part of the story. The stuff with his wife and kid is particularly moving.

"Every passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence."

The story briefly touches on the separation of a convenient city life from the comparative harshness of a rural existence and how those far off places can be left behind in the march of progress.

The identity theft is a bit of a stretch and the cracking of the hidden code too, among other things. For the sake of the story we are to imagine that such feats come as a natural result of increased brain capacity.

"And I felt a twinge of loss for that Logan, for the man I had been 1,115 days ago, who had simply enjoyed an idyllic place."

The story was also a bit over the top with how understanding his environment more thoroughly has taken away from its beauty instead of added to it. A common misconception of those overwhelmed by science.

"We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves."

Apparently our upgraded persons can perform self augmentation of their own faces? I was prepared to basically ignore how this might work until it popped up repeatedly as a way that the super humans were avoiding the recognition algorithms of the surveillance state. We're not talking about a sewing kit or prosthetics here, as best I could tell this had something to do with dramatically altering their resting bitch face. I don't know. Perhaps the extra brain function allowed them to concentrate on pulling faces for longer.

Anyway, overall this was a lite 'n' easy read. It's supposed to be a thriller and I would say it's a pretty fast narrative, but I didn't really get the chest throb that I usually associate with suspense and thriller stories. Maybe because the super abilities disconnected this reader from familiarity, or perhaps too many easy outs took away from the tension of the situation.

Finally, just a quote that I liked:

"It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize. No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream."

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