Upgrade

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Just because you can, should you?

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I think about these words a lot, especially these days. The first time I really pondered the idea of doing, or not doing something, because of Pandora's out of the box consequences was the right after the first time I watched Jurassic Park. Dr. Malcom's character, with all his outlandish behavior and intuitive assertions, appealed to my logging camp-dwelling, philosophical, teenage soul.

Even if it might help solve a problem, should an advance be taken if it has irreversible consequences?

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Heavy stuff to ponder indeed.

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And Unbound by Blake Crouch deals with that line of thinking throughout all three hundred plus pages of the his tale. The author delivers a genome-hacking, brain-aweing page turner that has honestly made me go down so many deep thought rabbit holes over the last couple days since I closed the book.

ACGT, our little protein building blocks play into the genome-hacking adventure of protagonist Logan Ramsay in more ways than a reader who was opening the book for a bit of a sci-fi adventure diversion could conceptualize. I honestly can't even imagine the amount of research that went into Upgrade. Crouch's novel Scrivener file must be of an impressive size.

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Sort of like our genome.

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But that's the whole point of his book, a book that I read in a little over two hours because I just couldn't put it down. Upon reading the first few pages I felt like it had infected me, I had to know where it went. Humanity's fate depended on me finishing Crouch's words.

And yes, that was dramatic. It's all due to the book. If you like quick-paced plots that overload you with all sort of technical jargon, then this book will entertain you.

If you like books that give you superhuman characters and battle scenes, this book also delivers.

However, if you like books that deliver a narrative that knocks you off of your existential track, then this book will absolutely destroy you. In a good way. Kinda like an infusion of psychedelics into one's consciousness, only the delivery is not via ingested compound or through a building block rewriting virus, it's through the written word.

But back to our organism compositional letters and my overall point when it comes to how I feel about Unbound. We humans are on the fast track to ending. The convergence between those who think we need to hack our biology and evolve and those who believe we should let nature take its course is beyond a fun thing to consider. There's also themes tackled in the book regarding the lines of the importance of our humanity. If we advance our intelligence, become super human, will we eliminate ourselves because we lose that which makes us so very, well, human, our capacity for compassion?

As you can see, this book is not just an awesome romp through genetics themed action-ville. There's so much thought-fodder to chomp on.

I also probably shouldn't have read Upgrade after spending a couple days reading Inspector Armand Gamache novels. But that's a review (or two) for another day...

In closing, if you like themes of advancing science, all things biology, biohacking, transhumanism, competing ideologies, nuclear level family dysfunction, self-sacrifice and just plain old well-constructed fast moving plot fun, then Upgrade will entertain you.

Just be prepared for a wave of Dr. Ian Malcomisms to crash into your cortex as you go along for the ride!

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And as not most of the time, the cover image was sourced from Pixabay whereas the rest of the images were taken on my full of its own unique code iPhone.

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