Review: Upgrade

Upgrade by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blake Crouch returns with his latest terrifyingly fast-paced (helped, of course, by his trademark single-line paragraphs of sentence fragments) sci-fi thriller. This one is slightly less space-time continuum mind-bending than Dark Matter and Recursion before it, but makes up for it with its near-future post-apocalypse and its use of genetic warfare to a level worthy of Michael Crichton. Crouch also puts his protagonist in a pretty unique moral position, not only when he becomes the unwilling subject of an experiment to rewire his genes and increase his intelligence and ethics, but also when he realizes that he was selected specifically because of his connection to the experimenter. This, plus the fact that his late mother accidentally caused at least one part of the apocalypse, with her attempts at genetically-modified crops failing so horribly that at least 200 million have died in the Shenzhen Famine some decades prior. That said, though, Logan has already spent years making a life of his own, and that gives him the advantage as he rises to the challenge of preventing his same upgrades from killing yet more millions, if they're allowed to wreak their intended havoc in the world. I imagine this one will be pretty well ready for a film adaptation someday soon, even if the aesthetic might resemble Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan's misfire Reminiscence a little too closely...

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