Stuff I've Read: Upgrade by Blake Crouch

A raid gone wrong leaves a government agent in rough shape.  However, as he recovers, he notices that he’s not just feeling better, he’s getting better—improved memory, enhanced intellect, and sharper problem-solving abilities.  Witness the birth of humanity’s next evolutionary step in Blake Crouch’s 2022 novel, Upgrade.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch (2022)

Upgrade features Logan Ramsay, a field agent for the Gene Protection Agency (GPA), an international task force aimed at stopping bioterror, specifically incidents involving gene editing.  When an informant leads his unit into a trap, Logan catches the full brunt of an explosive device with a viral payload.  He awakens in a Denver-area hospital, feeling fine.  But then he beats his daughter in a game of chess—something he had never been able to—with something less than a conscious effort.  As days pass, Logan finds that his memory, cognition, reasoning, and ultimately his intelligence, have grown sharply and is still growing.  Logan comes to the terrifying realization that his genome had been hacked in the raid, and from there, it doesn’t take long for Logan to figure out that he was targeted for this upgrade and why: years prior, Logan’s mother—a brilliant geneticist—inadvertently caused a global famine by hacking the genome of certain locusts to transmit a virus to kill a particular strain of rice.  However, she lost control of the bug, the virus mutated, and most of the world’s varieties of rice went extinct.  Now, someone is using her research to save the world by hacking human intelligence, and Logan must not only figure out whether the ends justify the means, but he’s got to figure out what to do about it.

Over the last eight or nine years, I’ve become a huge fan of Blake Crouch.  His novels have been insanely readable, and presents complex people with the intelligence to change the world as they deal with real-world problems.  Upgrade is no different, where at the heart of it, Logan is a man who is dealing with an uncomfortable family legacy from his mother while being increasingly disconnected from his wife and child.  He bears responsibility for the sins of his mother, even as he is given the power to do something about it—or not.  It makes for a compelling character-driven narrative.  Upgrade is also insanely readable; I originally read it in 2022, and did so in one night, and did a cursory re-read for this review in one night as well.  It holds up.

This is where I would normally list my gripes with a story, great and small, but in this case, I don’t really have any.  And I looked.  The story is a pretty tightly told one.  The characters are deep and rich.  Motivations are understandable and, in some cases, noble, even for the “villains.”  It’s a damn good sci-fi thriller.  Blake Crouch knocked it out of the park

Pros: Another brilliant sci-fi thriller from Blake Crouch with solid characterization and a compelling plot; insanely readable.

Cons:  Can’t really think of any.  I guess the only flaw is that all good things come to an end?

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.