... the IT man in LibraryLand One has just finished reading Upgrade by Blake Crouch, an XMAS gift from Grannie A, and I found it to be a reasonably enjoyable techno-thriller worth a 3 star rating.
What I did love about it was the way it made me think about all the upgrades it proposed and their consequences. Which left me with several perplexations and frustrational feelings.
First is several times throughout proceedings where it seems highly implausible that acting faster can give the advantages the protagonist enjoys. For example, and I may be incorrect here but, I don't think being fast would mean one could fire twelve shots from a pistol within 1 second, surely the mechanical parts of the pistol would put a limit on such shenanigans?
One believes this is a case of the author erring on being too specific here in order to push the upgraded nature of the protagonist, i.e. compare and contrast:
- I squeezed off 12 shots within a second before they could react
- I squeezed off 12 shots before they could react
The big one that got to me throughout the story is that it so totally buys in to the belief that everything we have ever experienced is saved in our brains in perfect 3D HD detail with surround sound and smellovision but is locked away somehow.
Now One could easily have accepted that "perfect" memory was achieved by the eponymous Upgrade and from that point onwards, but found it constantly irritating that the beliefs on memory ran so counter to current research that has memory being akin to storing a series of dot points about events that we update and change every time we review the memory.
The second big one involves the ending so spoilers ahead.
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(highlight to read)
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The Epilogue has several issues to it. Firstly there is the fact that we were earlier told his rapid upgrade would burn him out and kill him and yet here he is 3 years later all fine and dandy and overseeing the "correct" upgrade to humanity.
Secondly is the un-ironic (as far as I can read into it) horrific ending whereby he is force upgrading humanity, not with intelligence that will still leave people doing evil, which was the "wrong" way, but with empathy for all of humanity not just your closest 150ish people. The horror being that this is most likely going to leave humanity in empathic paralysis as they consider the impact of everything on everyone.
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Apparently hone of his other books - Dark Matter - is a currently a TV series (but not the good Canadian sci-fi Dark Matter series). One wonders whether it will also cause one to twitch throughout proceedings.
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