BOOK REVIEW: Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Upgrade by Blake Crouch is the latest book from the author of other technothrillers such as  Recursion and Dark Matter.  I think I have read enough Crouch novels by now to notice a common theme: the main character is usually a straight white guy with a family who finds himself in an extraordinary situation (typically involving a technological advance that seems like or actually is science fiction) that he has to resolve through ingenuity and taking decisive (sometimes violent) action. Below I will provide evidence for my view by summarizing the three Crouch novels I have read so far.

 In Recursion, the main character is Barry Sutton, a straight white NYPD detective who got divorced after his young daughter was killed in a hit-and-run accident ten years before. Barry learns that the recent increase in FMS (False Memory Syndrome) is a result of a technological advance that allows certain people to reset reality for everyone else; the false memories people are experiencing are really memories of the previous reality which has been erased that somehow are lingering on in their consciousness. Barry has to figure out what he can do to restore reality, and decide if he can and should select a reality where his daughter doesn’t die.

In Dark Matter, the main character is a straight white guy named Jason Dessen, a former quantum mechanics scientist and physics college professor who has a wife Daniela and a baby son Charlie. One day Jason regains consciousness while stumbling out of a metal cube. He realizes that he is in an alternate universe where 15 years ago the alternate version of Jason (which he calls Jason2) decided NOT to marry Daniela and instead pursued his quantum mechanics research and ended up creating a device (the metal cube) that allows people to jump between parallel universes. Jason2 has swapped places with Jason in order to explore what his life would have been like if he had pursued Daniela instead of research. Jason has to figure out how to get his life back from a more ruthless version of himself, Jason2.

In Upgrade, the main character is Logan Ramsay, a straight white guy married to a female history professor who teaches at American University in Washington, DC and has a tween daughter who regularly beats him in their daily chess game. Logan works for the GPA (Gene Protection Agency), a federal agency tasked with enforcing the Gene Protection Act, which outlawed all gene manipulation and research in the United States. The GPA also authorizes universal, invasive  surveillance of all U.S. citizens in order to enforce the ban on gene research and resulted in the incarceration of most biotech scientists. The legislation is a(n over)reaction to “The Great Starvation,” a cataclysmic event that was triggered by the release of genetically modified locusts in China by Logan's mother Miriam Ramsay in order to try to improve rice production a decade before the events in Upgrade. Miriam Ramsay was well known as a brilliant scientist and one of the richest people in the world before her experiment resulted in the starvation deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Logan’s mother killed herself soon after the magnitude of her mistake became clear and Logan went to jail for multiple years for his minor role in the event (as an assistant). During a routine raid to find a rogue geneticist Logan is infected with some biochemical agent which after a few weeks he realizes has upgraded and altered his genome, giving him all sorts of enhanced abilities like increased concentration and mental acuity, thicker bones, and speed and agility. Of course the GPA outlaws all gene modification so when the extent of his abilities becomes clear Logan is kidnapped by his own co-workers and taken to a secret site where they can observe him and monitor his changing body. He gets busted out of the secret prison by someone who has very similar upgraded abilities to him; this turns out to be his sister Kara. 

This somewhat brief summary of the beginning of Upgrade may seem like it contains spoilers but really this is just the initial setup to the main plot of the book and leaves several questions for the reader. Such as, who designed this upgrade? What will it mean for the future of society if it is effective, especially a society where gene enhancement is so prohibited and everyone’s actions are monitored so closely? Could Logan's mom be involved somehow?

One of the main features of Crouch’s writing is that the action is literally fast and furious. He’s also pretty skillful at depicting his main character in a sympathetic manner so that the reader is caught up in the circumstances that affect him and wants to see how or if he can figure out a way to survive them. This is especially the case in Upgrade, which like all the other books by Crouch I’ve read really seems like a spec script for a Hollywood blockbuster or hit streaming TV show. There’s thought-provoking technology in a world similar but significantly altered from our own, with a sympathetic protagonist facing long odds to succeed. What’s not to like? One quibble I have is that these books are starting to seem a little too glib and formulaic. As I’ve pointed out above, Crouch’s last three books have noticeable similarities. However, they have also all been huge hits and big bestsellers. The guy is good at what he does! There's also something plastic/uncompelling about his main character's relationships with other people. In Upgrade, Logan has a complicated (and slightly bizarre) relationship with his sister Kara. It's like Crouch's characters have facsimiles of relationships, not the real thing. I think this is what causes me to not connect emotionally with his books. (But they are still a delight to read.)
Overall, I’d recommend Upgrade to anyone who has read and enjoyed Dark Matter and/or Recursion.

Title: Upgrade.
Author: Blake Crouch.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 352 pages.
Publisher: Ballantine Books.
Date Published: July 12, 2022.
Date Read: November 23, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆  (3.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+ (3.3/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B.
WRITING: B+.

BOOK REVIEW: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir has quite a lot going for it. The book jacket has blurbs from giants in science fiction and fantasy like Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin and Blake Crouch. Barack Obama included the book in his list of summer 2021 reads. Weir is most well-known for his blockbuster debut novel The Martian which became a blockbuster film directed by Oscar-winner Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. His “thing” is realistically depicting hands-on science and engineering ingenuity to survive realistic, life-threatening situations. The premise behind Project Hail Mary is eye-catching (if surprisingly far-fetched for an author whose previous work has leaned so heavily on verisimilitude as a selling point). A newly discovered bacteria called astrophage somehow is causing the luminosity of the Sun to diminish at a slow but exponentially increasing rate which will lead to the extinction of all life on Earth within a few decades. Project Hail Mary is humanity’s attempt to investigate and fix the problem, but when the book begins all the reader knows is that something has gone horribly wrong and the main character has woken up alone in a spaceship (named Hail Mary) after spending years of interstellar travel at relativistic speeds in an induced coma leaving him with no memory of where he is or why. Unsurprisingly, Ryan Gosling is attached to a possible film adapation of Project Hail Mary by the producers and screenwriter of The Martian. (No word yet whether director Ridley Scott is interested in helming his second Weir adaptation.)

The structure of the story in Project Hail Mary is brilliant; it is told in two linear time-frames near simultaneously. The reader slowly learns that the main character’s name is Ryland Grace and that he was a junior high school science teacher. Because of Grace’s amnesia, the reader gets little drips of Grace’s life prior to the Hail Mary while he’s adjusting to the situation he wakes up to. Slowly he remembers that he’s there to try to save the world by discovering why Tau Ceti is the only local star near ours which has not experienced a reduction in luminosity in recent decades. Project Hail Mary was intended to be a one-way scientific mission with three scientific experts to investigate the phenomenon and discover a solution for the astrophage infestation harming the Sun and send it in four quadruple redundant “information life boats” back to Earth. So the two timelines of the story follow Grace trying to complete his mission in the future and remembering the past when he was involved in the preparation and design of the Hail Mary, along with the amazingly dictatorial leader of Project Hail Mary Eva Stratt (who would be perfectly cast by Emily Blunt or Tilda Swinton in the inevitable film adaptation). Ryland Grace is supposed to be white, American, under 40 and average looking. I had someone like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tobey Maguire or Topher Grace is who came to mind as I was reading. Ryan Gosling would probably be great.

There’s an incredible and incredibly surprising development about one-third of the way into Project Hail Mary that I don’t want to spoil in this review. Suffice it to say that it moves the plot in a whole different direction and switches the book from scientific thriller to something else in addition. Without revealing anything more I can say that this development is an amazingly positive aspect of the story. It provides another example for Weir to show he is able to deploy his scientific chops to describe a scientifically complicated scenario and raises the emotional stakes of the story.

The reader learns some shocking things about Ryland as the earlier time frame unspools in his memory that causes us to question our identification with him as the main character. However, another plot twist very near the end of the book provides Grace with a dilemma that allows him to redeem himself to the reader and results in a very surprising ending (which I suspect will not survive the Hollywood film adaptation). Overall, I think that Project Hail Mary is at least as enjoyable and exciting as The Martian, and is almost certainly a better (written)  book. I look forward to reading more from Weir, and I strongly agree with President Obama’s recommendation to include Project Hail Mary on your summer reading list.

Title: Project Hail Mary.
Author: Andy Weir.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 476 pages.
Publisher: Ballantine Books.
Date Published: May 4, 2021.
Date Read: July 21, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Recursion by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch is the author of multiple, best-selling, mind-bending thrillers; his atmospheric novels in the Wayward Pines trilogy were adapted into a television show for Fox. I enjoyed his previous book Dark Matter (2016) but have not read any of his other work.

The buzz for Recursion (2019) is even higher than for Dark Matter so I was greatly looking forward to reading it. Not much is given away in the blurb (“A breath-taking exploration of memory and what it means to be human.”) but it was clear to me even before I started that the story must have something to do with time travel.

Crouch has a very direct, visual and propulsive writing style. At times this book reads like a screenplay instead of a novel. The story develops very quickly and moves ahead even faster. The main characters are Barry Sutton, a NYPD detective, Helena Smith, a neuroscientist, and Marcus Slade, a billionaire investor. Slade invests in Smith’s nascent technological invention, a way to map, store and transfer memories.

The book switches into high gear when Slade hijacks the development of Smith's technology, turning it into a world-altering device. This is where Crouch fundamentally loses me. The thing Smith has invented allows a person not to recover their memories, instead it allows them to go back in time to the moment when that memory was created. (In order to do so they have to use Smith's memory-mapping technology and then die immersed in her device, which produces huge amounts of a brain chemical which spurs the person in the tank to alter reality itself to conform with their saved memory.) Crouch never uses the term “time travel” but that is really what Recursion is about at its core. It is uni-directional time travel, only back in time. Eventually, when the time traveler lives long enough to get back to the time when the timeline was split EVERY PERSON IN THE WORLD suddenly becomes aware of the events in the removed timeline (the timeline the time traveler was from) as “false memories.” They also have sudden nosebleeds and a sudden splitting headache. This is where Crouch completely lost me and I ceased to enjoy the book. It’s so obvious at this point that the impact on world events would be so extremely significant that what happens from that point in the story on just devolves into nonsense.

What kept me going was my investment in the characters of Helena and Barry. I was also somewhat curious how Crouch would write himself out of the pretzel plot he had created. For awhile it seemed like he actually would let it spiral out of control but in the end he resolved it satisfactorily.

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised that when Crouch was writing the book he “saw” the final scene in his mind’s eye first and the entire book was written to get there. It’s a great scene in the context of what went before but it was not enough payoff for me.

Title: Recursion.
Author: Blake Crouch.
Paperback: 336 pages.
Publisher: Crown.
Date Published: June 11, 2019.
Date Read: November 26, 2019.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆☆  (3.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B (3.0/4.0).

PLOT: B.
IMAGERY: B.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: B-.