Thank you to NetGalley, Blake Crouch, and Ballantine Books for my advanced reader copy of Upgrade!

I think I have reached the point that sci-fi (within reason) is my guilty pleasure genre. I loved both Dark Matter and Recursion, so I knew that I had to get my hands on Upgrade when Blake Crouch announced he was writing another book on Instagram.

The Story

“You are the next step in human evolution.”

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.

My Thoughts

One of the things that I really like about Blake Crouch is that his writing feels so well research. Often, in sci-fi, things are just too out of this world to even be believable (even in a book). With Crouch novels, they make scientific sense. It’s real-world sci-fi.

The concept of genetic manipulation is something that has been touched on in a few other places that I’ve seen, but not to this extent. It’s a curious concept, and definitely part of the future, though the extent can be concerning (as was evidenced in this book).

Of all three books of his that I’ve read, I will confess that Upgrade was my least favorite. However, I still really enjoyed it. The book was told in three (or four?) parts. While they’re all part of a consistent timeline, with some gaps between, it felt inconsistent somehow. Maybe jumpy is a better word.

If you ever saw the movie Gravity (with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney), I would say it felt like that. It’s tense basically the whole time, but it also almost felt like there wasn’t any crux to the novel. There was, of course, but you’re almost so exhausted when you reach it that you’re just ready to wrap it up.

All in all, Blake Crouch is still one of my favorite sci-fi authors. A girl on Instagram posted about liking one of his books, and I just had to tell her to read all of the other ones. If you’re looking for a book that’s going to make you think, go with Blake Crouch.

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