Takeaways from Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Solid addition to the upgraded intellect genre

I just finished the novel Upgrade by Blake Crouch, which is a great read in the style of a hardboiled action thriller where the protagonist uses near future technology to achieve their goals. (like Daemon by Daniel Suarez or the Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam)

It’s also the story of a protagonist who upgrades their own intellect, like Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Understand by Ted Chiang. But this book uses biotechnology to do so and backs up the actual upgrades with specific real world genes that would help one get those results.

In this post I’ll share the upgrades depicted and their believability, as well as the flaws I saw in the near future narrative.

But overall, I’d recommend this read if you like this genre!

Entertaining Believable Genome Upgrades

I enjoyed the way the intellect is written as improving. I have doubts that these are things that could actually happen to the human genome, but they all pass the believable test.

• He can divide his consciousness to do multiple things, like watch television and talk to his wife and read a book at the same time. We’re all bad at multitasking but capable of it, after all.
• He can remember everything and photographically go back to any memory that he experienced in his life and remember the specifics. But that’s not smarts alone — we all know we misremember things all the time and if you didn’t imprint it correctly why would you be able to correct it without new data? (incidentally, perfect recall is the plot of a Black Mirror episode AND a Ted Chiang short story, as it happens)
• He can perfectly read anyone’s micro facial expressions because they telegraph what they’re thinking and what they’re about to say or do.
• And he’s very aware of his heartrate and BPM and what emotions he’s feeling. Like a super analytical emotion identifier that can choose to feel them or compartmentalize oneself from them. I guess the subtext here is that emotions make you human, and him not feeling them makes him a transhuman. Near the end he consciously makes himself feel them more often in an attempt to relate to his family, for instance.
• The battles all have excessive metrics like ‘guy 2 moved 5.3 feet to the left, which would put him on me in a trajectory of 3 seconds, so I stepped 3 feet to the right, and fired exactly 4 bullets.’

Uneven Narrative (low spoilers!)

The narrative is excellent but maybe 20% uneven. Here are my issues with it, doing my imperfect best to avoid spoilers.

• The genius bio terrorist can engineer the magic upgrade serums but can’t stop Alzheimer’s? Come on!
• The protagonist wastes multiple chances to stop the antagonist. I understand why, but for a superhuman, he’s surprisingly bad at making up his mind.
• I’m not sure why he got upgraded twice. I hypothesize that it was conveying a ‘to defeat the transhumans, you must become a transhuman’ kind of thing.
• The rationale for the bio-terrorists is ‘existential risk is going to destroy humanity within 100 years unless we do this’ and that fact isn’t truly backed up anywhere. Is it climate change? AI? Something else? Explain the risk before jumping to drastic solutions!
• Likewise, the narrative doesn’t give us reasons as to why the protagonist is against being upgraded. Just a weak ‘but I want to relate to my family!’ bit that isn’t fully explored. There’s the error rate, yes, but he’s against the upgrade in general, not in specific, it seems.
• Why did he get the upgrade through a bomb while the antagonist got a special bee sting? Might as well use unique tracker bees in all cases IMO. Still, both of those are fun ways to get something into someone’s body.

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