From the Publisher
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A lot of fun . . . Crouch knows how to do a chase, when to blow stuff up and when to bring the house lights down. . . . But what makes Upgrade special is that his path is unique. He takes turns that are unexpected [and] explores some stunning vistas along the way.”—NPR
“From the first page, it’s clear you’re in the hands of a master storyteller; Upgrade is by turns mysterious, fascinating, and deeply moving—exploring the very nature of what it means to be human. Spellbinding.”—Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient and The Maidens
“Imaginative, perfectly paced, and extremely clever, Upgrade walks the fine line between page-turning thriller and smart sci-fi. Another killer read from Blake.”—Andy Weir, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary
“The incomparable Blake Crouch has, once again, completely blown my mind. Upgrade is more than a brain-bending thriller; it’s a siren in the night, warning us all of the dangers of playing God with the human species.”—Justin Cronin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Passage Trilogy
“Blake Crouch has a mind like Crichton and a heart like King—Upgrade is riveting, tense, scrupulously researched, and deeply heartfelt.”—David Koepp, author of Cold Storage and screenwriter of Jurassic Park
“Blake Crouch doesn’t pull any punches in this taut and evocative examination of what humanity really is—and how it fails us. A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant thriller that you’ll be thinking about long after you turn the last page.”—Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Chosen Ones and Divergent
“[A] nail-biting near-future science thriller . . . Crouch fully develops his alarming concept and its implications along with delivering masterful characterizations. This is the best yet from a creative and gifted author.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Mind-bending . . . an excellent follow-up to Crouch’s other dark-science novels . . . Will appeal to readers interested in climate fiction or superhero origin stories, as well as those who enjoy smart thrillers.”—Booklist
“High-octane action, some moral complexity, and a surprisingly emotional ending elevate this novel. Recommended—even for reluctant science fiction readers.”—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
We found Henrik Soren at a wine bar in the international terminal, thirty minutes from boarding a hyperjet to Tokyo.
Before tonight, I had only seen him in INTERPOL photographs and CCTV footage. In the flesh, he was less impressive—five and a half feet in his artificially distressed Saint Laurent sneakers with a designer hoodie hiding most of his face. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a book and a bottle of Krug.
I commandeered the stool beside him and set my badge between us. It bore the insignia of a bald eagle whose wings enveloped the double helix of a DNA molecule. For a long moment, nothing happened. I wasn’t even sure he’d seen it gleaming under the hanging globe lights, but then he turned his head and looked at me.
I flashed a smile.
He closed his book. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. Just stared at me through Scandinavian blue eyes.
“Hi, Henrik,” I said. “I’m Agent Ramsay. I work for the GPA.”
“What am I supposed to have done?”
He was born thirty-three years ago in Oslo but had been educated in London, where his mother was a diplomat. I could hear that city around the edges of his voice.
“Why don’t we talk about that somewhere else?”
The bartender was watching us now, having clocked my badge. Probably worried about getting the bill paid.
“My flight’s about to board,” Soren said.
“You aren’t going to Tokyo. Not tonight.”
The muscles in his jaw tightened and something flickered in his eyes. He tucked his chin-length blond hair behind his ears and glanced around the wine bar. And then beyond it, at the travelers moving through the concourse.
“See the woman sitting at the high-top behind us?” I asked. “Long blond hair. Navy windbreaker. That’s my partner, Agent Nettmann. Airport police are waiting in the wings. Look, I can drag you out of here or you can walk out under your own steam. It’s your call, but you have to decide right now.”
I didn’t think he’d run. Soren had to know the impossible odds of eluding capture in an airport crawling with security and surveillance. But desperate people do desperate things.
He looked around once more, then back at me. With a sigh, he polished off his glass of champagne and lifted his satchel from the floor.
We drove back into the city, with Nadine Nettmann behind the wheel of the modified company Edison and I-70 virtually empty at this hour of the night.
Soren had been installed behind the passenger seat with his wrists zip-tied behind his back. I’d searched his carry-on—a Gucci messenger bag—but the only item of interest was a laptop, which we’d need a federal warrant to break into.
“You’re Logan Ramsay, right?” Soren asked, his first words spoken since we’d escorted him out of the airport.
“That’s right.”
“Son of Miriam Ramsay?”
“Yes.” I tried to keep my tone neutral. It wasn’t the first time a suspect had made that connection. He said nothing else. I could feel Nadine looking at me.
I stared out the window. We were on the outskirts of the city center, doing 120 mph. The dual electric motors were almost silent. Through the wraparound NightShade glass, I saw one of the GPA’s new billboards shoot past—part of the latest public awareness campaign.
In black letters against a white background:
GENE EDITING IS A FEDERAL CRIME
Downtown Denver loomed in the distance.
The megatall Half-Mile Tower soared into the sky—an arrow of light.
It was one a.m. here, which meant it was three back in D.C.
I thought of my family, sleeping peacefully in our home in Arlington.
My wife, Beth.
Our teenage daughter, Ava.
If all went smoothly tonight, I’d be back in time for dinner tomorrow evening. We were planning a weekend trip to the Shenandoah Valley to see the fall colors from the Skyline Drive.
We passed another billboard:
ONE MISTAKE CAUSED
THE GREAT STARVATION
I’d seen that one before, and the pain hit—an ache in the back of my throat. The guilt of what we’d done never failed to hit its mark.
I didn’t deny it or try to push it away.
Just let it be until it passed.
The Denver field office of the Gene Protection Agency was located in an unremarkable office park in Lakewood, and to call it a field office was generous.
It was one floor of a building with light admin support, a holding cell, an interview room, a mol-bio lab, and an armory. The GPA didn’t have field offices in most major cities, but since Denver was the main hyperloop hub of the West, it made sense to have a dedicated base of operations here.
We were a young but quickly growing agency, with five hundred employees compared to the FBI’s forty thousand. There were only fifty special agents like me and Nadine, and we were all based in the D.C. area, ready to parachute in to wherever our Intelligence Division suspected the existence of a dark gene lab.
Nadine drove around the back of the low-rise building and pulled through the service entrance to the elevators. She parked behind an armored vehicle, where four bio-SWAT officers had their gear spread out on the concrete, making last-minute weapons checks for what would hopefully be a predawn raid based on the intel we were about to extract from Soren.
I helped our suspect out of the back of the car, and the three of us rode up to the third floor.
Once inside the interview room, I cut off the zip ties and sat Soren down at a metal table with a D-bolt welded into the surface for less compliant suspects.
Nadine went for coffee.
I took a seat across from him.
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something?” he asked.
“Under the Gene Protection Act, we can hold you for seventy-two hours just because.”
“Fascists.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t exactly wrong.
I placed Soren’s book on the table, hoping for a reaction.
“Big Camus fan?” I asked.
“Yeah. I collect rare editions of his work.”
It was an old hardback copy of The Stranger. I thumbed carefully through the pages.
“It’s clean,” Soren said.
Donna Repsher –
Let me start by admitting to being a Blake Crouch fan–his more recent novels have been mind-blowing science fiction, but I don’t know how he’s going to top Upgrade, which was, quite simply, among the most brilliant, futuristic science fiction novels I’ve read since his novels, Dark Matter and Recursion, as well as every novel Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote. It more than earned a 5-star rating.I’ll also warn prospective readers that you might find some, if not all of the medical/technological/biological jargon in this novel baffling, but stick with it, because this cautionary, dystopian, futuristic tale and it’s message are all too possible about our future on this big blue marble spinning in space, its human inhabitants given, in this novel, a mere 150 years until extinction.Logan Ramsay is the son of Miriam Ramsay, perhaps the world’s most brilliant geneticist, whose genetic editing attempt to control a specific insect species from devouring crops in the Far East led to 200 million deaths and what became known as the Great Starvation. It also led to the federal criminalization of all gene editing, and the formation of the Gene Protection Agency, for whom Logan works. All Logan ever wanted was to learn enough to someday join his mother in her work, but his IQ was no match for hers. and an encounter with another brilliant geneticist and a raid on a possible dark gene lab lead to Logan being infected with a genetic upgrade, which soon has him locked up and studied like a lab rat as the effects of the upgrade being to manifest themselves, and that’s only the beginning of this fascinating and gripping read.As Logan’s upgrade continues to improve his body and mind, an outbreak of some weird pathogen in the most remote town in the U.S. has him heading for middle-of-nowhere Montana, where he soon realizes that the inhabitants of this town have also been subjected to some sort of genetic upgrade, one that’s turning some of them mad and eventually killing them. Someone is following in this mother’s scientific footsteps and he believes he knows who that is. And so the chase is on to find and stop this mad scientist before they infect the entire world population, ignoring the fact that doing so will eventually result in at least one billion deaths.This cautionary tale is both a fast-paced action thriller, and a study of the human condition and conscience, both with deep psychological and sociological implications. It warns of our impending doom as a species unless we act soon to turn things around and strive to make vital changes that, if you follow the news, make our possible demise all too possible. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and Blake Crouch follows in the steps of such giants as Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov, who saw what our possible future could be, and strove to warn us in time–if we only listened.This is a brilliant, emotional and frightening look at our near future, gives us much food for both thought and action, and it’s final paragraph had me smiling through my tears. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.
William Bolton –
The first book by Mr Crouch that I read was “Recursion”, and it amazed me. It may be the best scifi novel I’ve read, inventive and plausible (at least to my mind), rich and compelling. A great story, well told, with well-developed characters. Mr Crouch joined William Gibson and Daniel Suarez on my admittedly very subjective and limited list of great science fiction authors.After finishing it, I immediately bought “Upgrade”, “Dark Matter” and “Summer Frost”. I stopped reading “Frost” when in the second chapter I found it involved a lesbian main character, and I returned it for a refund. Just before that, I finished “Upgrade” and on its merits as science fiction and a novel, I would give it four stars and have, but I was disappointed that the author is buying into the climate change hoax which is being very heavily promoted despite having no real scientific basis and which is and will be used to justify curtailment of our freedoms, means of reducing population like “vaccines”, and attacks on agriculture, meat production and the introduction of synthetic foodstuffs, insects as food, and “milk” made from maggots and blow fly larvae. We are looking forward to a soon-coming famine. The globalists are insulting us and most people are going along with it. So that woke bias together with a quote from Yuval Harari who believes with his ilk that we are just “useless eaters” has greatly disappointed me. I think Mr Crouch needs to do more research.
David M. Chess –
Dan Brown but with less self-insertion and more violence, maybe.The science is no more or less inaccurate than one would expect, although there are some howlers. (And the bizarre take on how a door can be locked from only one side is just… bizarre.) Unnecessary brand names, weird quasi-military jargon (using “glass” as a verb to mean “examined with field glasses”), the occasional raw solecism. The tendency to break into a string of short noun phrases (shorter than these). Pretty much par for the course.It’s hard to write about basically super-intelligent characters, because one is not super-intelligent. So there are too many places where something relatively ordinary is presented as a sign of brilliance (every math nerd knows the Fibonacci sequence up to at least 55!), or when someone supposedly super-enhanced does something dumb or fails to do something smart; I would have enjoyed this more I think with some more effort put into extremely clever things, and less into ordinary shooting and explosions.The ending was acceptable. It seems like the protagonist ends up doing pretty much the same thing he was fighting to keep the main antagonist from doing for most of the book, with an adjustment that only partly addresses the reasons he opposed it so strenuously. But there were are!A pretty fast read, some interesting ideas. I wish it had explored them more, and spent less time on gunfire and explosions and blood on the walls.
Mark R –
Fantastic read
This book checked all the boxes for me:- believable hard(ish) sci-fi- fast moving plot- great character development- no romance for the sake of having it- made me think deeply about the main premises of the plot- entertains storyExcellent book. I will likely read it again at some point
Xorsh –
Dilema sobre la ingeniería genética
Muy bien escrito; Crouch nos da personajes sólidos, de carne y hueso. Un futuro distópico de alta probabilidad, enfrentando dilemas morales sobre el destino de la especie humana. Lectura fácil, que me llevó 4 o 5 horas.
Deborah –
Superspannend verhaal met actueel thema
Ik heb de Kindle versie en Blake Crouch stelt niet teleur. Superspannend verhaal met actueel thema. Geweldig, aanrader!
Patrick May –
Science based thriller.
A wonderful story that grips from the very beginning. High-paced action filled with emotional heartbreak. A good background in scientific fact, or maybe facts, provides enough interest for those with education in these areas to accept the premise and enjoy the thrill ride.The writing keeps up a breathless race with sufficient breathing space to absorb the underlying message. Thoroughly enjoyed.
PR –
Ennuyeux
J’ai eu du mal à aller jusqu’au bout. Le concept est plutôt bien trouvé, mais le traitement est soporifique. Dommage.