Book Review: UPGRADE by Blake Crouch

UPGRADE by Blake Crouch (Ballantine Books, July 2022) Hardcover, 352 pages. ISBN # 9780593157534 

Synopsis on the Goodreads website . . . . .

The mind-blowing new thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter and Recursion 

“You are the next step in human evolution.” 

At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep. 

But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways. 

The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy. 

Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost. 

Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human. 

And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution? 

Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.

 My Four-Star Review on the Goodreads website . . . . .

     I’ve heard so much about Blake Crouch that it was time to read something, but I wanted to start with a stand-alone story and this was a good choice. UPGRADE was very entertaining and thought-provoking regarding the nature of humanity /Homo Sapiens. Crouch is an excellent writer that knows how to engage readers, create interesting characters, and pull us through a fast-paced story.

     The science behind what happens in a near-future America seems realistic enough and Crouch does his best to explain it, although the details made my head spin. Hopefully, some knowledgable geneticist will review this and let us know if the speculation is sound or just pseud0-science. I have to admit it convinced me. 

     There's also a subtle-for-some, not-so-subtle-for-others message within the story about what makes us human and where as a species we have been heading. It's a little doom and gloom, but I share many of the somewhat cynical observations: "We don't have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor is wha't driving use towards extinction.”  In spite of that, the ending of UPGRADE was very satisfying to me, bittersweet and warm.