UPGRADE

BLAKE CROUCH

I was very eager to read Upgrade when I knew the book was coming out. I had set a reminder on my calendar months in advance so that I could start reading it immediately. And it was totally anti-climatic for me.  

Upgrade was clearly a rushed book, with little to no rewriting done whatsoever. I really enjoyed Blake Crouch’s previous books (Recursion and Dark Matter), but this one was just poorly executed on all counts. To write about a super intelligent human, any author themselves needs to be adequately intelligent and aware about the inherent paradox of having to write about a being far superior to themselves. That is clearly absent here. This book seems to be written more as a script for an action film rather than as a speculative fiction book which can be taken seriously. Dropping gene names and popular “intelligent” books cannot really convince a reader that the character has suddenly become a walking computer.

The main character finds himself in a basement where a make shift bomb goes off. He later discovers that his genome has been modified, and he is now superman, minus the flying and eye lasers. He is then interrogated for unauthorized gene editing by his own boss, and is then saved by his ultra clichéd – action movie – badass – military background – token side character woman – his sister. They both then discover that their genius mother whom they thought had died has been well and alive for over a decade. And then they find her dead. Then the sister and brother turn on each other as they have different ideas about how the gene tech their mother has invented should be used on the entire planet. Each of these sentences arrives as if it is a supposed major twist in the story, but falls absolutely flat with the reader having guessed this a few chapters earlier. The book failed to convince me on any of the points that Blake Crouch was trying to make.

The short story “Understand” by Ted Chiang is a far superior story along the same premise as this book. Upgrade, on the other hand, is a poorly written mash up of “Lucy” and “Minority Report”.

As opposed to the title, Upgrade is really a downgrade to the quality of Blake Crouch’s books.