📚 Finished reading Upgrade by Blake Crouch.

I read and enjoyed “Recursion” by the same author earlier this year, so was enthusiastic to try this, his latest novel, out.

It’s set in a somewhat dystopian but very recognisable world of the presumably near future. We haven’t solved our environmental problems, in fact parts of Manhattan are unusably flooded amongst other such places. But technology has advanced a bit, in particular our ability to edit genes.

Although gene editing was outlawed following a misguided attempt by top scientist Miriam Ramsay to enhance the resistance of rice to a particular blight. Best of intentions maybe, but there were of course unforeseen consequences which led to a mass starvation, hundreds of millions of deaths, and a ban on genetic engineering. Miriam killed herself.

The ban is enforced by the Genetic Protection Agency, where we find out protagonist, Logan Ramsay, working. Logan is Miriam’s son, who seems to be working there more out of a sense of guilt for the impact his mother had on the world - he himself was involved enough to go to prison for a while - than a love for the job.

One day, a raid goes wrong and he’s exposed to an unknown virus. The symptoms are agonising at first, but he recovers his health soon enough. And more besides. Suddenly he feels stronger, more intelligent, more sensitive, with a better memory. He can even beat his daughter at chess. Until, imprisoned for genetic self-engineering, he no longer has the opportunity to.

Then a figure from his past life turns up, also stronger, fitter and cleverer than either of them had suspected. The problem is that they strongly disagree what they should do about it. The potential consequences of the decision could hardly be higher.

To get to the bottom of that requires resolving several deep ethical problems. What risks do we have the right to take in the name of a potentially better future? And even what does it mean to be human? Not that you’ll need an ethics PhD to understand the situation, honestly it’s mostly an action thriller, substantially less intellectually demanding to me than the last work of fiction I read was. But the conundrum is real, and adjacent to one that humanity is already facing.

I’m not yet sure how I felt about the end of the epilogue, but was fully engrossed throughout the main story.