'Upgrade' by Blake Crouch
'Upgrade' by Blake Crouch

The good

  • Fascinating premise of being able to “upgrade” DNA to give humans super intelligence, cognition, physical traits, etc. The book explores the premise in a few interesting directions.

  • Draws you in and keeps the pace pretty high most of the book (although there are a couple weird lulls/pauses here and there).

The not so good

  • The plot doesn’t have any interesting surprises. There are no real twists or turns. No risks. It just moves forward along fairly predictable lines and then peters out towards the end.

  • The book doesn’t seem to deliver on one of its core themes: unintended consequences of messing with things we don’t really understand (genetics, biology, etc.). We see an example of this right at the start of the book with the disaster with messing with the genes of crops leading to a global famine, but then all the experiments on human DNA, which if anything should be far more complicated and disaster prone, seems to go just fine?

  • The other core theme of impending doom due to climate change, nuclear weapons, diseases, etc. is dealt with in a slightly ham-fisted way. Too much tell, not enough show.

  • I found myself not caring for or rooting for any of the characters. None of them seemed especially likable or good; not even the protagonist. Maybe it’s because he gets upgraded and keeps saying over and over how much better he is than everyone else?

Rating: 3.5 stars