In Upgrade, Blake Crouch has written a page-turning, scientific thriller that is also a morality tale.
In the near future, we meet Logan Ramsay, whose mother was the most brilliant geneticist ever born. She brings on a global famine by releasing genetically-modified insects that were meant to cure a rice blight. Logan, just out of college, was working for her at the time and ended up going to jail for it. His mother wasn’t held accountable: she drove her car off the highest cliff on the California coast.
We meet Logan some 20 years on, working for a government agency established to police genetics. On a raid, he gets hit with the shrapnel from a bomb and contracts a horrible fever. It turns out that he was not a random casualty but the target, and the virus he was infected with is changing his DNA.
The changes are the “upgrade,” making him stronger and smarter. He discovers he is part of a rogue plan to upgrade all of humanity in this way, in order to stave off the extinction of the human race. The problem is, being smarter doesn’t make anyone more likely to work together.
Logan must give up his old life and self and make his own choices. Can he save the world?
As enticing as it might sound to be able to tweak the human genome, I think the ideas in this book are fantasy. From what I understand, there are no precise genetic markers for qualities like intelligence. In addition, the changes that happen in Logan’s brain are based on a faulty understanding of memory and perception.
I do appreciate where the book ends up, with the idea that it’s not intelligence we need to expand in people, but compassion. If this book can be a vehicle to get just a few people who don’t normally think about such things to consider how we might combat climate change with compassion, it will have been worth it.
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