Anywho…

Despite Claims to the Contrary, Everyone Wanted a Switch 2

At this point, loud, speculative complaints should be seen as a form of positive excitement around a product.

It’s when something is met with apathy that companies should be worried…

I, for one, will be suing Nintendo for stealing my “If I was President of Nintendo” diary entry.

• 120fps

• 4K

• HDR

• Mouse controls!?!

• GameCube collection

• Backwards compatibility with upgrade options on some titles

• AN EXCLUSIVE FROMSOFT GAME!?!?

• Nintendo brand Discord…

All without announcing anything about the Xeno series, which I have specifically been holding out on for the Switch 2 before I play. I couldn’t feel any more seen and yet utterly disrespected. What a time to be alive.

Putting the analysis cap back on, Nintendo really did do exactly what I was hoping they would: refine the Switch. It’s already a great platform which is standard enough that everyone knows how to do something with it, but open enough that people can do something weird if they want to.

This is exactly where Nintendo needs to be at this point. We aren’t in the 90s and 00s. Consumer computer hardware is pretty well “solved” at the fundamental level. What they want from their hardware is consistency and inherit flexibility, so they can do all manner of wacky experiments with smaller buy ins.

Like LABO. There are very things they can’t just release as extensions to the Switch platform if they wanna be fun, wacky Nintendo. And all their fans can buy into those little experiments ala carte.

Meanwhile, those of us who like a balance between traditional console experiences and the more creative side can now enjoy that with a modern standard of fidelity.

It’s perfect and I love it.

[Premium] PC Gaming is Dead

Yeah. Wow.

On the other end of the spectrum, Nvidia’s 50 series cards have launched and gone through rigorous evaluation since my last update. And, while I knew it wasn’t going to be a big release for raw throughput, I was utterly surprised by just. how. little additional horsepower that ended up being.

About 15% for the 5090 and 5080 on average… which comes with a 15% increase in power consumption. Not only is that the smallest generation increase we’ve seen on the high end to date, it’s also effectively a 0% power efficiency increase.

Why is it like this? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s because no progress has been made in terms of shrinking the processor nodes. So, effectively this is just a layout update at the processor level.

Now, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been a bigger update… but uh…. Well, I’ll say more after I get to AMD.

What about the AI Features?

The new AI features came out and… were exactly what they looked like, for better and worse. There is no magic with multi-frame gen, it really is only really useful if you can already hit a solid 60-90 frames per second. So, it’s only real reason to exist—it seems—is for people playing on 240hz+ monitors. Which is already a very niche product and experience.

It’s also… kind of a dumb one. I’ve had monitors that hit those framerates, and you get them when want them to play games like Counter Strike, League of Legends, Fortnite, etc. at a competitive level. Where you need as much visual information with as little input lag as possible.

Multi-frame gen gives you frames but for a slightly higher overall latency than playing without it on. So… it’s for primarily competitive players who occasionally want to play AAA games in high fidelity on their fancy monitors.

Except it’s also kinda not, because active competitive players are buying 1080p and 2k for their high refresh monitors, not 4k. Anyone with sense has a second 4k panel somewhere that’s 120hz tops for the “looker” games. And if they don’t care about the looks they’re probably playing without multi-framegen anyway and you know what you get the point moving on—

AMD Succeeded by Doing Nothing and I Still Lost

Those madmen did it! They made a card of equal performance to last year’s high end for 2/3rds of the MSRP!

…

Unfortunately, because Nvidia’s top end was such a dud, this means the sharks were hungry and swarming by the time this morsel dropped.

This is 2 months later. These are the cheapest listed and it’s still sold out even up to the $280 markup.

That’s the first one available.

Is the card everything I was hoping it would be? According to reviews, absolutely!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually exist as far as I’m concerned.

But here’s the really interesting part

Desktop graphics hit a ceiling this generation. AMD didn’t make a more powerful card than last year. They actually made a slightly less powerful one… just with a lot better features overall. The ceiling was softer in Nvidia’s case, but given their history as the top dog, even that’s a very dramatic thing.

15% is absurdly low for a generational improvement. 30% used to be considered “underwhelming” in the high end GPU market.

The promise of the modern PC gaming platform is that you’ll get higher fidelity sooner than consoles. That only works if GPU improvements are outpacing consoles. Which they were, and still are.

But while consoles take 7-9 years between generations, they come with at least twice the computing power, if not sometimes three or four times. And now, with mid-generation “pro” models being a consistent part of PlayStation’s strategy, and a consideration from the other two, it’s almost more of a 3-5 year gap in the fidelity race, albeit with only 30-50% increases in the middle.

…Which, thanks to this lackluster generation of GPUs, is exactly the cadence PCs just fell into. And while the highest tiers of performance are still only available on PC, the premium is now absurd to make it worth it.

For reference, a PS5 Pro is about $700 for the full package, and has a GPU about equivalent to a 4070, and once you really start optimizing for it being a console, the Pro can even duke it out with the 4070ti.

The lowest price for a 4070 right now on Newegg is $600. That’s without any other components. An equivalent CPU is gonna tag another $200-300 dollars. Motherboard: $150-200 (which is also absurd, but the state of things). RAM: $100. Fan: $40. Case: $40. Power supply: $80-100. SSD: $100-150.

So, just with the prices I remember from my last time building (last year), we’re at ~$1300-1550. And THEN we have to throw a minimum of $50-100 to start actually making it better. And since the PS5 Pro is hitting 4k 60 pretty easily at good fidelity in all but the most absurdly demanding games, we’re really aiming for something like a 60-100% total performance uplift to make it worth it.

Which means we’re throwing another $400 at the GPU and $150 at the CPU minimum, and now we’re down $2000 before your computer is actually got enough performance margin over the PS5 Pro to make it worth the money—for fidelity nerds like me.

I paid $3000 for a computer four years ago, when the PS5 was out and cost a mere $400-500, so believe me, I know this equation still works out for some people.

But that was when we thought there was no chance consoles were ever going to catch back up. Now the top end console is within spitting distance of the highest attainable consumer graphics card—that is, the 5080, seeing how the 5090 has completely left our atmosphere on the price wars (look it up if you don’t already know). And what’s more, there’s no longer that invincible guarantee that the next generation of PC hardware will have any improvement, let alone a significant enough one to beat out the PS6…

Which Sony is already openly talking about during their technical deep dives on the 5 Pro.

God bless Mike Cerny.

I need to take a moment and express how AWESOME it is that Cerny is doing these updates. This one was loaded with information.

Now, consoles are also in tricky territory with the current state of processor manufacturing, but consoles have headroom to work with, and thanks to AMD’s 9070xt and their partnership with Sony, they just proved that catching up is very possible.

If PC hardware is sluggish for just one more generation, that’s it. The fidelity race is over. No one in their right mind would buy a PC…

…for fidelity.

A New Form of PC Gaming Will Live on Strong

Remember that Halo Strix APU I mentioned last time? No? You didn’t read the last one?

That’s okay. I’m not going to cover it all here today, but the short version is PC’s have a route out of their existential hole. They can become consoles.

The main architectural difference between consoles and gaming PCs right now (to my knowledge) is the division between the GPU processor stack and the CPU. APUs throw that out. The thing was, though, that none of the processor manufacturers bothered to attempt a high end APU. Probably for several good reasons at the time (I’ll save that whole story for another time after I do more research), but now apparently those reasons have been assessed and thrown out.

AMD has a high end APU.

We don’t know what it’s going to be like in practice, yet, but based on products like the Steam Deck, which as a low-medium grade AMD APU, it’s gonna keep the PC gaming space relevant by providing a cost effective medium-high spec option for people who want a PC for the flexibility and variety, not the fidelity and convenience.

And it’s going to allow that power to exist in small-form-factor PCs, so that makes them even more attainable and desirable. Now a console is competing against the home work PC for those people who have limited budget and especially physical space in their home. It is the Ultimate Apartment Living Media Device.

If you even have a TV in that scenario, chances are, it’s next to your desk. You could get a $400 POS laptop and a $400-700 console and a $200-300 TV… or… you could buy a $900 high-tier laptop or mini-PC and that TV or a monitor. Obviously there isn’t a clear cut winner there depending on your seating and TV sharing needs…

But for a single guy on a budget this is revolutionary.

I don’t actually know how the prices will shake out for the AMD AI MAX+ 395 (rolls off the tongue), but I would be shocked if they shoot for much higher than 2-3x the current APU market at the top end.

Anyway, that’s all the ranting and raving I have time for this time. Of all the things I write, these B-side articles are me at my most unfettered, so if you’ve made it here—

Wow

That’s all. Have a nice day.

I will relegate these kinds of articles—along with my reviews of various media—to the “Crow’s Opinion” section of Ars Corvi for you all to subscribe separately and at your own discretion.

The Switch 2 was officially announced and people proved that they don’t deserve it

Finally after 7 years, 10 months, and 13 days of everyone and their dog providing “legit” leaks about Nintendo’s next console generation, culminating in a year of NDA breaking and skirting even the CCP could only dream of orchestrating, the Switch 2 has finally been announced in a brief teaser for a full reveal in April.

The collective consensus: there were no surprises.

Of course there weren’t. The final design proved that the leaks going around weeks ahead of time were accurate. Likely confirming that a lot of other claims made are accurate. I would dare say that Nintendo only went ahead and announced the thing now just because of how accurate they have been.

Take for instance, this article from The Game Post on January 11th on the Genki mockup that was floating around CES. Note the images used by the Game Post here of the “Switch 2” which came from that and compare to what Nintendo finally unveiled:

Yeah…

I still think the analysis on its graphics performance has been speculative at best, but I think it’s safe to say that the rumors leave little else to the imagination. Backwards compatibility was confirmed and they did a little swoopy animation with the controllers over a surface implying that the mouse-like pointer functionality rumored on the updated Joycons is also going to be a thing.

Personally, I’m very happy with this announcement. The Switch has proven to be a versatile and effective gaming platform. Its successor being the same thing but with more compute power and some other small architectural modernizations will be a huge plus for developers and players. All Nintendo’s platform has been lacking is that: power. And frankly, I applaud them for never giving more than necessary in light of my realizations on how often us software people abuse the power we get.

Some people are less enthused, however:

For the record, Tripster is slightly misrepresenting Max’s opinion here. Max only calls the announcement a Nothing Burger. But the rest of the sentiment does seem to match what Maximillian Dood is saying in the clip.

I’m not throwing shade on anyone involved here, but I do want to point out a particular opinion that I do want to point out as silly. An opinion that a significant amount of investors held to, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

I 100% agree the Switch 2 may have no surprises. What I disagree with is that this is a disappointment.

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We didn’t need any innovation, we just need an even more solid base to build from

The days of constantly revolutionizing the gaming world with consoles are long behind us. In fact, I’d personally argue that they ended with the Oculus Rift. Short of wiring people directly to machines (a thing we really may not want to do for the sake of a hobby), you can’t really get more immersive than VR. Especially VR that’s connected to the internet. And that’s the only frontier of gaming left that’s really dependent on new kinds of hardware.

As I’ve talked about before (how many times can I link to myself, I wonder), there’s very little on the core system of modern computers that’s holding us back from creating any sort of gaming experience we imagine. Almost all of the innovation left to do is cultural. We’ve experimented with a LOT of different ways to play games these last 60+ years, and Nintendo has already dabbled in pretty much all of them. A lot of things are possible but not a lot of them are things that people want to do.

That’s not to say they don’t have their audience, but the audience’s can’t sustain the kind of gaming ecosystem at the core of Nintendo’s business. Their consoles have to have broad appeal. The Wii U would have been a success for a smaller company. Nintendo is not a small company.

Thus, Nintendo has to sell a console that’s general purpose. And the first Switch already fit that bill with flying colors. Short of AR/VR, which Nintendo purposefully avoided [outside of their LABO experiment thing] *correction from my Nintendo Expert editor, what is it not at least theoretically capable of? I won’t repeat things I already talked about in my full article on the subject of console releases. Instead, I’ll just reiterate the following.

We don’t need new hardware novelties. We haven’t even finished figuring out how to use the hardware we have!

No one should have expected anything different

It seems like a lot of people missed the metanarrative about Nintendo that was laid out with the launch of the Switch: their Wii is dead. Long live the handheld division.

While everyone had somehow convinced themselves that Nintendo’s console strategy revolved around crazy innovation (a view that was frankly overblown if you remove the Wii and its successor from the equation), the handheld side of their business was holding strong with their real hardware tactic: gradual iteration.

• The GameBoy took the Game & Watch and added the ability to play multiple games on one device and added an external data tether

  • This was pretty revolutionary

• The GameBoy Color… added color

• The GameBoy Pocket… made it smaller

• The GameBoy Advance gave it more processing power and added more buttons… to match the already released Super Nintendo

• The GameBoy Advance SP made the screen light up and the device fold in a clamshell

• The GameBoy Advance Micro… made it smaller (but skipped the folding)

• The Nintendo DS gave it a second screen with a resistive touchscreen, a wi-fi transceiver, more processing power, and dedicated system data storage.

  • Overall, quite a significant jump

• The Nintendo DS lite… made it smaller

• The Nintendo DSi added cameras

  • The digital storefront and expanded operating system is significant, but also that was mostly software changes by that point

• The Nintendo 3DS… made the screen 3D

• The Nintendo 3DS XL… made it bigger

• The Nintendo 2DS… made the screen not 3D

• The New Nintendo 3DS added a little nub[, zR and zL buttons, and more of that sweet, sweet computing JUICE] *correction by my Nintendo Expert editor

• The New Nintendo 3DS XL… made it bigger

• The New Nintendo 2DS XL… made the screen not 3D again

The Switch then came in and merged in the better of the features from the console side of things. Even the docking is really just an iteration of what the Wii U was doing. It seems really dramatic because these two threads merged—in fact, the divisions themselves merged. But, note that by this point in history people were already connecting controllers to their iPads to play games commonly enough that companies were making and selling products specifically for this. So, a super reductionist view could look at the Switch and say that all Nintendo did was provide a more polished version of what was already becoming a gaming cultural norm.

Now, looking at it that way fast forwarding to today, what was Nintendo’s other option for a new console? VR.

Well, Oculus and PlayStation are already taking their spot there on both the portable and high-fidelity ends of the market—and that’s just on the budget side. Additionally, that market has existed since 2016 with some fairly active investment and still does not move the numbers a company like Nintendo needs to justify its place.

I should also add, though I’m unsure how true this still is, Nintendo is a “blue ocean” company. They don’t like moving into fiercely competitive markets. The Switch was a once in a lifetime opportunity in that instance where the concept was not actually that novel but the market was severely underdeveloped even though it did exist. You can thank Apple for that and their consistently terrible understanding of the gaming market. They had the hardware, but they do not have the culture.

Well… I think I’ve ranted on Nintendo enough for now.

tl;dr The Switch 2 looks to be exactly what Nintendo should be releasing and anyone expecting more should get their heads out of the clouds and realize we have a beautiful landscape of possibility as it stands.

Nvidia is shouting “AI” from the rooftops

To NO ONE’s surprise, Nvidia focused all of their 50-series GPU related announcements at CES on AI related features. They will once again be the top dog of power consumption and proprietary tech that uses novel methods to render games. Of particular interest to me was the Neural Material features which essentially extends the kind of image generation functionality of their Machine Learning processes to all layers of a “material” in 3D rendering. That is, the ML algorithm not only determines the final pixels of the underlying low res texture, but also the layers that determine more specific lighting properties like subsurface scattering.

This is actually really really cool. I don’t know how practical it will end up being for actual game development, but like raytracing it can actually allow for certain effects to be rendered which we otherwise do not yet have performant traditional algorithms for.

Dampening the excitement for this is the fact that since it is Nvidia exclusive, game developers will still have to develop and ship traditional materials for everything, so it won’t effectively save any storage space and the actual performance characteristics of the technology are unknown. But the results they’ve shown off are impressive enough that even just a handful of releases showcasing the feature will make the fidelity crowd quite pleased with getting a 50-series card.

Multi-frame Gen I was more excited about until I realized that they aren’t actually doing frame exrapolation just more interpolation. Having recently used AMD’s FSR 3 frame gen and actually having a good experience, I don’t doubt Nvidia owners will appreciate that much more fluidity (especially considering that companies are now producing monitors with refresh rates of 700+, a frankly pointless exercise, I think, but might as well let people try it I guess). However, since it still has the same fundamental latency behavior, this is only useful for people with monitors reaching the 240hz+ range as you need a game logic frame time of 16ms (60fps) or less to consistently mask the downsides of the interpolated frames, which means the game can’t take any longer than that to produce each of the “key” frames and generate the interpolated “tween” frames.

I think using animation terms will be far more fruitful in discussion than saying things like “fake” and “real” frames. They’re all fake.

That said, there are two things I was excited to hear about from that whole endeavor:

1. They developed hardware level frame pacing technology! According to their presentations, multi-frame gen is very pacing sensitive so they finally put their weight into tacking that dragon with the resources only they can as the silicon designers. If this proves successful, then we may be looking at a new definitive solution. We shall see, but just the hope of it is exciting enough for me.

2. They fundamentally updated the algorithm behind DLSS from convoluted neural networks to a “transformer” based algorithm. Frankly, I don’t care enough about the specifics of Machine Learning to even try and explain the difference to any of you, but the point is that we can actually expect a serious update to the image quality and performance of DLSS—which is already the most impressive upscaling technology out there. So, hitting that 16ms frame time will presumably be more achievable with DLSS 4 than 3. At the very least, it should look prettier when you do.

Also of note from Nvidia is that their cards did not significantly increase in price. Now, some people are complaining that the 5090 is more expensive than the 4090 MSRP… but come on. That’s a tier of card that was never hiding the fact that their are luxury products.

If $200 dollars makes the difference between whether you will or will not buy a 5090, you should not be buying a 5090. This is frankly almost true for the rest of the stack, but the 5080 and below are at least in the range where your average American could find a way to fit it into their budget but have to decide how they’ll balance between CPU and GPU.

Meanwhile, AMD is looking to make that entire question of value irrelevant without even saying anything

There’s been much speculation around why AMD didn’t give any performance details whatsoever about their two new “9070” series cards at CES. To me, the answer is quite obvious. Nvidia is so dominant in the high-end space that you don’t really have any good option aside from letting them announce their plan and then tailor your message around them. It’s not like the company as a whole didn’t get any limelight. When it comes the CPU market, AMD is starting to enjoy the same luxury of dominance Nvidia has with GPUs.

And to that end, while the naming schemes in the CPU space are absolutely atrocious, the Strix Halo APUs are really exciting. I’m actually hoping for high-end “System on a Chip” processors to become an option in the desktop space. Theoretically, we could start to see the advantages of gaming console architectures on the PC platform as SoC’s allow for unified memory between the Central and Graphics processing. But, that’s all still just hypothetical.

What’s also hypothetical, but so widely leaked that it’s likely true, is that the 9070 GPUs will have performance near AMD’s current flagship card for just over half the cost. In addition, FSR4 is confirmed to bring ML based upscaling to the platform, and the new card will actually have serious hardware accelerated raytracing, bringing them up to a level that makes Nvidia’s low-tier cards a much, much harder sell.

As much as I promote raytracing and path-tracing as the way forward for rendering, the practical reality is that even the games with a heavy amount of raytracing are still mostly using traditional rasterization methods. So if you can get even ~70% of the raytracing performance, but ~30% better rasterization overall, that’s a good deal.

And having used the 7900 GRE for 4k gaming for a few months now, even trying some light RT on it from time to time, if you gave me the same thing but two steps better on its main selling point, 4 steps better on the RT side, and a serious DLSS competitor on the software side, for the same price, I will happily stay right here on Team Red.

I’m feeling like it’s 2016 again with these rumors. I loved that old RX 480 8GB.

Summing up CES

Nvidia: AIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIA…

AMD: *kicking Intel while they’re down while pretending Nvidia isn’t bullying them*

Intel: *hanging on for dear life, but hey they made some decent budget GPUs this time*

The monitor industry: “700 frames, huh?… Yeah that’s cool and all. But, uh… *wiggles brow* Ours can hit 800.”

And that’s all for this issue of the Tech Update. If I didn’t mention it here, it clearly wasn’t important.

Will I do this next month? Who can say.

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This was a “kind of” recommendation by a friend when I was asking for recent novels that I could potentially use as a comp-title for my own. You see, I am horribly out of date when it comes to books. For instance, I only just read through the Harry Potter series for the first time in 2022… And yes, my family was fine with tales of wizards and witches (my dad just thought it was lame when we could be reading Lord of the Rings—which is a fair point, but I actually rather enjoyed HP).

Generally you could assume that if I’ve read something recent, it was a changelog of a JavaScript framework (but those become “old” after they’ve been sitting out for an hour, so the pattern remains (that was programmer humor, I’m sorry (so are these nested parenthesis (… they are also a Dave Barry reference)))).

Alright, enough of the obscure jokes; what did I think of this book?

It was alright, I guess. The prose itself didn’t leap out to me in any particular way, but it did effectively create a tone and picture of the world. There was a suitable dourness to this vision of the future, but not so dour that it became depressing. It was an impression like seeing the world after it had experienced a “near death.” Not so damaged as to completely change day-to-day life, but damaged enough that everything is effected in a substantial way.

The pacing was pretty good; only a few scenes felt like they outstayed their welcome, and then only by a smidge. The scenarios presented were fun as well with a good throughline of “the thrill” carrying things forward without leaving the reader in a valley for longer than necessary.

I can’t say I found the plot particularly fresh as it got underway, but the starting premise is actually interesting in how it highlights the potential side-effects of bio-engineering genetics in a way that most stories don’t, even when they include the topic. Generally speaking, gene editing is envisioned as a localized practice where individual people are tailored into the bodies they (or their parents) desire. That certainly is still an element here—and is one of the more poignant parts of the story—but it’s more so interested in the unintended changes that could occur from rampant use of the technology.

Novel super viruses, accidental sterilization, the destruction of whole species of food crop. It’s a story about genetics with an understanding that genes don’t necessarily stay nice and cooped up in the body of their original owner. Not only does all biological life modify and propagate its code as a matter of course, but those aforementioned viruses are prone to mucking about in others’ code as well.

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Unfortunately, I feel that the rest of the story’s elements really didn’t really capitalize on this concept as well as they could have. It feels like there are plot holes all over the place. There might not be… but it sure seems like there are.

I believe it stems from the level of “upgrade” our protagonist (and later others) receive. They are demonstrated to acquire cognitive processing capabilities that are literally superhuman: perfect memory, the ability to focus on multiple things consciously at once, eventually the ability to “effectively” slow time by manually changing the speed of his own perceptual processing. And that’s on top of the kinds of physical improvements one would expect.

All of the genetic science descriptions of these things and the scene-by-scene writing is fun to follow. The problem comes when the real drama of the story kicks in—when these superhuman character’s have to make hard decisions about their lives and lives of the people around them.

In a pivotal moment at the end of the first act of the story, the main character and his sister are faced with the greatest of these decisions. After receiving the “gift” of a superhuman gene sequence, their mother—in her “will” of sorts—then leaves them with the materials necessary to spread that change to the rest of the world. To that point in the story, the siblings were on nothing but good terms (if maybe a touch estranged by circumstance). A difference in opinion is evident, but Crouch then immediately escalates the tension to the extreme and the siblings turn on each other over how to handle that “gift” to the point of extreme violence.

This is an interesting turn of events as far as the theme of the story is concerned: mankind gets the keys to the future and their first act is to try and kill their own family to make sure they get to be the one to pick which gate to go through. It does have a lot of poetic potential, but this is an unambiguously “hard” sci-fi story, and the “hard” analysis my brain put together says that even if the two of them didn’t have superhuman emotional self-control—which they do—they would still have taken the time to enumerate all of the possibilities they could before coming to such a final ultimatum. And from everything we see them do just prior to this—like accurately extrapolating the past lives of strangers off first-impression visual hints—it feels like they could have been weighing a lot more than two simple solutions.

Or actually just one solution and a “not that.”

There’s this feeling in the novel that a large assumption is lying in the undercurrent of the drama: that is that mankind’s “intellect” does not exist purely on the typical metrics, but has multiple distinct attributes, yet everyone involved in the gene editing works on the model that intelligence is one-dimensional—the better the brain cognates, the higher the intelligence.

You could argue that the subversive assumption that intelligence is multi-dimensional is hinted at by the generic acknowledgement that “we don’t know all the possible effects of what we’re changing,” or the protagonists vague appeals to “the things that make us human.” That is a fair analysis to make, but my issue is that those things are always spoken of in vague terms until the very end when it’s revealed that actually those too can be upgraded biologically. Meaning, the protagonist was not contending with an intangible side of humanity which can’t be so easily corrected, but yet another metric he and his sister—and his mother—could have been using from the start to speculate on solutions.

To Crouch’s credit, he does actually address this matter in an interesting way with the mother character as she explicitly, and clearly states her philosophy towards the “soft” intelligences of humanity. Plus, the mother is only a normal—albeit academically exceptional—human, so her reasoning is far more believably flawed. I can also see the rich value in a dynamic where the daughter who once took such a different path from her mother is the one to so blindly inherit her legacy, while the son who once tried to follow in her footsteps is the one to question the path his mother took. Alas, the delivery of the scene spoiled the appreciation of that dynamic for me.

This whole dynamic of mothers and sons and daughters also brings up another element of the story’s metanarrative that I found interesting to chew over, yet not particularly satisfying in its execution: how none of the many prominent women in the plot were playing the role of the female lead.

That spicy phrasing aside, I don’t mean that it was “missing” a “damsel” character or some traditional female archetype; I mean that almost all of the significant expressions of femininity in the tale came from the men, while the women overwhelmingly exuded masculine traits and decision making.

It was the protagonist who tries to run away with the “golden” research data over a vague desire to find a more compassionate path forward, while his sister is the one who turns to violence and “ends justify the means” thinking. It was their mother who worked obsessively and set aside compassion for what her ideals concluded to be the best course for humanity, it was her husband who couldn’t cope with the grief of the loss of a son and committed suicide.

Now, there are interesting stories you can write about emasculated men—Fight Club is of course the first that bubbles up from my meatheaded subconscious; Godzilla Minus One is perhaps an even more interesting one (I should write on that later)—but I don’t get the sense that Crouch was intending to make his main character so emasculate. My evidence being that the premise of the book is that he is a superman. Through genetic editing, he quite definitively becomes (at least of a time) the world’s most genetically perfect man.

Or maybe it is intentional. Maybe Crouch is trying to speculate that merely upgrading our physiological hardware cannot change the nature of the person. However, I still doubt that’s the intent, both because of the conclusion saying, “yes, we can upgrade those parts, too,” as I lament earlier, but also because it really feels like if you gender swapped the entire cast of characters in the story you would end up with a story almost stereotypical in its strict adherence to gender roles.

And that’s not something I normally really pay too much attention to. I’m a software programmer who likes to spend my time making and enjoying art and the gentle joys of life. I’m not exactly sitting here looking for all the men in stories to be Conans or all the women to be Arwens. Nevertheless, when this subtext is one of the things even I find odd about a thriller about making superhumans, I can’t help but feel like it would have been nice to get at least a little more thoughtfulness and intent with that dynamic.

I will mention that there was one interesting part where the mother is reaching the end of her life, her work obsessed veneer finally cracks, and her last thoughts and actions become entirely devoted to her children. I thought that was a good moment of development on the theme. Unfortunately, the remainder of the character development came off as aloof to this dynamic.

Would I recommend this book to anyone? Only if you’re really interested in the topic of gene editing or just want a fix of sci-fi drama. From a science standpoint, it’s quite competent. And as I said, it’s enjoyable as a thriller. But I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone looking for something deeper on the philosophical side or for strong characters. My friend who referred me to it might have put it maybe a bit strongly when he said, “the characters all feel like the same person”… but there’s truth to that.