Upgrade

 

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Fiction

2022

Finished on June 22, 2026

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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.

Upgrade is the third novel by Blake Crouch that I've read and enjoyed. As with Dark Matter and Recursion, I was quickly drawn into the story, the pages practically turning themselves. Similar to my reading experience with Crouch's books, as well as Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, I found that I could read about science, and specifically molecular genetics and genetic engineering, without getting hung up on the specifics. Published just four years ago, this timely novel struck several chords with how our nation (and world) is evolving:

And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.

Africa alone had four billion people, most of whom were food insecure and worse. Even here in America, we were still crippled by rolling food shortages, supply-chain disruptions, and labor scarcity. With the cost of meat having skyrocketed, most restaurants that had closed during the Great Starvation never reopened.

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

Each passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence.

Crouch's characters are rich and fully realized, and the dialogue flows smoothly. And yet, by the halfway mark, I grew impatient. The momentum of the story was beginning to wane. I pushed through and finished, but what I thought would be a 5-star read dropped down a full point. The author has sold the rights to Amblin, Steven Spielberg's company. I enjoyed the 9-episode Apple TV series of Dark Matter, and look forward to watching Upgrade once it hits a streaming platform. 

If you haven't read Blake Crouch, I recommend starting with one of his previous books. This one is somewhat underwhelming.

Dark Matter (4.5/5)

Recursion (5/5)