Upgrade

A book club pick 😉

After two books, I knew what I was getting into with Crouch – a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that is sure to entertain, in one way or another. I really liked Recursion; I liked Dark Matter a lot less; this one falls somewhere in between.

It’s a near future setting, and the climate change is slowly wrecking everything. Also, scientists have been very naughty with genetic engineering, and now this kind of thing is banned, banned, banned. (Me: stupid, stupid, stupid.) There is a Gene Protection Agency in the US, hunting rogue scientists and other disobedient citizens who want to do gene therapy, create new life forms etc. Logan is a GPA agent – one day, he walks into a trap and gets infected with an influenza virus. show more The virus is carrying stuff that is going to alter Logan’s genome in exciting ways. Don’t you just hate it when this happens?

Logan starts getting smarter, stronger, etc. There is a conspiracy, of course. We get fugitives on the run, secrets revealed, cat-and-mouse games, lots of action. Stuff keeps happening!

The books asks some interesting questions. What does humanity deserve? Or doesn’t deserve? What price would you pay to “save everyone”?

“Being smart doesn’t make people infallible. It just makes them more dangerous.”

But we don’t go very deeply into these themes. So I think I would have preferred less philosophy and more sci-fi thriller candy.

The body count is high, people die in gruesome ways. It’s all very “technical”, like a video game. It bothered me.

Also, this is the third book by Crouch featuring a man forcibly separated from his family/loved ones. This is getting old…

By the end of the book, the plot moves too fast to make sense at times. Maybe Logan had gotten so smart that I couldn’t keep up?

I liked the ending, but I am not sure how I feel about it. show less

A thoughtful sf thriller. It's like a science-based thriller version of Flowers for Algernon. I also think it would be a great companion piece to Joe Haldemann's Forever Peace because it explores the question of what would it take to get humanity to stop destroying everything.

Upgrade takes place in a future where tinkering with genetics has been outlawed after a devastating good-deed-gone-wrong resulted in worldwide famine. MC Logan feels guilty and responsible because he helped his brilliant biologist mom release the virus she had engineered, which caused the the crop blight. Logan has served his prison time, now has a lovely wife and daughter, and works for the Gene Protection Agency. He's doing a pretty routine assignment, when he is show more exposed to something strange. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Logan begins to think he has been given an "upgrade."

All the genetic engineering that Crouch writes about is pretty interesting. In real life, no one actually wants the MTHFR gene that he writes so glowingly about. And the idea of losing your sensory gating sounds like a TOTAL NIGHTMARE to me. But everything is explained very convincingly. The really interesting idea Crouch delves into is whether being more intelligent would lead people to make better and more rational decisions. Or would it just make people think they are better than everyone else, ignore their own trauma, decide that whatever they are already obsessed with is actually the most important issue in the world, and that they should make decisions for everyone else? And is that kind of intelligence really the most important piece of being a good human? I think, wouldn't it be great if cis men in the "science fiction community" and everywhere started pondering this question A LOT? So that is one great thing about this book.

Reading along, I felt that upgraded Logan's ability to set his emotions aside (in a metaphorical Faraday cage) was a mistake. And that greater rational ability would not help without greater compassion and a sense of interdependence and belonging. In the bang-up ending, it turned out that Blake Crouch had been leading me along by the nose the whole time and this was exactly what he was saying.

This is the third novel by Crouch I have read and I haven't been disappointed by any of them. I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for this honest review. show less

I really enjoyed this palatable cyber-medical fiction for non-science nerds. Logan Ramsay is struck by a physical hack that impacts his genome to make him smarter and stronger. He's obviously a guinea pig, but for whom - a government agency, or perhaps followers of his later mother Miriam, a genius who unleashed a genetic modification on insects that killed millions throughout the world by starvation? Except maybe his mother never died, and maybe his sister Kara was convinced that the upgrade that made Logan super-strong and super-smart should be forced on the rest of the world via a virus? Logan sees his role in the Gene War as improving the human species in a different way. The tension gallops along to a remarkable resolution.

Logan Ramsay lives with a lot of guilt. His mother, an infamous geneticist, though brilliant, was responsible for the deaths of millions of people worldwide. Logan now works for the Gene Protection Agency, a government entity created to control the amount of illegal gene editing performed in underground laboratories. After he is involved in an on-the-job accident, he wakes up to discover that his body is slowly changing...for the better. He's becoming physically stronger and his mind is able to process at a much higher rate. But who is responsible for this "upgrade", and why?

I've been highly anticipating Blake Crouch's latest novel, as he's become one of my favorite thriller writers in recent years, combining science fiction with an show more action-packed plot. As with his previous novels, this one was a quick read and I devoured it quickly. Though his writing style is easy to read, he does throw in a fair amount of scientific facts, in this case about genetics, and I found my head swimming a few times, but I was quickly re-directed once the action resumed, which happened often. There were a few twists & turns in this one, and it kept me on my toes. His books are definitely page turners, and as I hadn't read one of those in a while, it was quite refreshing. The idea of gene editing, though fascinating, is also quite scary and horrifying if taken to an extreme as in this book. Good topic for discussion, though. show less

Blake Crouch keeps getting better with every book he writes. His latest, Upgrade, continues that trend. Logan Ramsay works for the Gene Protection Agency. The agency tracks genetic scientists who may be doing illegal work. Much genetic research was outlawed after the Great Starvation, a worldwide phenomenon that devastated crops, an unintentional side effect of gene manipulation caused by Logan's mother. While on a raid, Logan is exposed to something. Soon he finds himself with improved memory and other mental and physical improvements. Government agents lock him up at a black site and begin running test after test on him. When someone unexpectedly breaks Logan out of the facility, he learns that his mother had plans for improving show more humanity and the human condition. Plans that only he can move forward or halt.
Blake Crouch is always asking the big questions about the intersection of technology and humanity. He makes it easy to understand the temptations that technological advances represent both on an individual as well as a global scale.

Upgrade presents great moral dilemmas and plays them out in thrilling fashion. Logan is on the run from a government seeking to capture him while he is also trying to stop a plan that could result in an untold number of deaths. He also has to wrestle with whether the changes he is undergoing are destroying his own humanity and ultimately put his own dangerous plan in motion.

No one is better than Crouch at portraying the moral complexity of science and technological possibilities. He does this against the backdrop of a thrilling action story that not only keeps you guessing every step of the way but creates the nagging question of whether or not you want him to succeed.

Great characters, thrilling action, and a brilliant concept make this one of the best books of the year. One that will have you thinking long after you close the book. We need more stories like this. Upgrade is Blake Crouch at his best.

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher. show less

I read Crouch's Dark Matter four years ago and very much admired how the author seems to negotiate that oh-so-fine line between the "sci" and the "fi" of the genre. This was my first time listening to his work and it was a very different experience than that of reading.

I appreciate the "realistic" dystopias like this one--those that remind us this is probably NOT a far off distant future, at least in some respects. Gene modification is certainly a growing aspect of our lives, and the ravages of climate change are inevitable. Crouch digs in to the moral questions connected to our survival of a species, and not in the same old clichéd ways. As with in Dark Matter, the book is threaded with a tale of decision making, and how one person's show more "save humanity" is another's "lose our humanity." Everyone has their own justifications, and I think Crouch really brings that forward with his protagonist, Logan Ramsay.

Where I didn't enjoy the experience of the audiobook is the lists....there were a lot. I think reading through lists of gene names (HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee symbols) would have been less irritating than hearing them read to me. I longed for a genetic upgrade to speed up time during those passages. Perhaps those who really dig details like that feel differently, but it did nothing for me except make me feel impatient.

Still, the story shares with good spy novels the sense of never knowing who you can trust -- even the protagonist. A lot of the characters operate at Anakin-as-older-padawan level (sorry for the Star Wars reference, which is a first for me). But that's good character writing--and it turns out that messing around with our genetics doesn't really change the human capacity to straddle good and evil...well, until the Epilogue. I would have preferred just the letter of the epilogue, but Crouch spares us a totally clichéd reunion (e.g. overwrought with emotion), at least.

The book spends too much time with cat and mouse/fugitive scenarios, and then seems to remember its raison d'être in fits and starts, so the rhythm of the book in that sense is my biggest issue. I also didn't really care for Henry Levya's reading. His voice is fabulously comforting as Logan--but a bit too much. Even in scenes that warranted the character having a strong emotional response, everything felt a bit too even-keeled -- playing chess was about the same experience as coming under gunfire. Levya is a great choice, in some respects, because he does really help us understand Logan as a sort of "everyman" character--but it all starts to blend a bit a couple hours in.

All in all a worthwhile experience, and it teases out some larger questions with which we should be grappling now, not "in the future." show less

Blake Crouch is the only science-fiction writer I will read with any regularity. That is because his plots and subject matter are never ridiculous. That is more true of UPGRADE than of any of his other books that I've read. He succeeds in making his main character and narrator sound like a scientist when he talks about genealogy and DNA.

Logan lives happily with his wife and child and never wishes for more. He is a scientist but now works as a special agent for the Gene Protection Agency. It is his job to find and arrest anyone who tries to modify genes.

On one of Logan's raids of a "dark gene lab," he is impaled with a virus that will upgrade his own genes and make him an almost superhuman. He discovers that this was a deliberate plan show more of his previously-thought-dead mother, also a scientist but far more brilliant than he is.

What follows is Logan's adventures as he attempts to prevent his mother and then his sister from infecting the world with this virus. They feel that the human species can only be saved by this upgrade. But Logan knows that he can't stand by and watch millions die from the virus's negative effects.

This all happens in the 21st century, only a few years from now. Crouch could be implying that this is something we need to worry about but warns that "it's not nice to fool Mother Nature" (which you may remember if you're old enough). He could also be saying that our intelligence doesn't need to be upgraded. Maybe his final letter to his wife and daughter explains it. show less