Upgrade by Blake Crouch
Effective as a sci-fi thriller, but unsatisfying on other levels
(I enjoy writing quick reviews when I finish experiencing a piece of media, so I’m going to continue that practice on this publication as a bit of bonus material.)
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 You see, I am horribly out of date when it comes to books.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.
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.