Upgrade

C'est dans le titre ! Upgrade est un très bon Marvel. Tout y est : - Le gentil et la méchante, que tout rapproche, mais que tout oppose, tous deux dotés de super-pouvoirs. - Le monde est sauvé par le gentil face aux intentions de la méchante. - Une technologie nouvelle, source des super-pouvoirs, mais dont l'usage est détourné par la méchante (inconsciente qu'elle est !). - Le happy-end. - Et même la séquence post-générique, pour faire réfléchir.

Même sentiment ambivalent, donc, que devant un bon Marvel. La portée philosophie de l'œuvre n'est clairement pas le but. Ce n'est pas de la science-fiction non plus, tant la science est maltraitée. Ce n'est pas vraiment du fantastique. En résumé : c'est une histoire de supers-héros, comme on les aime ! Car oui, Upgrade fait passer un excellent moment, et se laisse difficilement mettre de côté.

Et si l'on veut trouver une morale à cette histoire (sans révélations malencontreuses), il suffit d'écouter Spiderman : un grand pouvoir implique de grandes responsabilités.

Not his best work yet. Recursion, which got me hooked on the author and made me read Dark Matter, has a sort of elegance that both Dark Matter and Upgrade lacks. It's a fun, intense and easy read on an interesting topic for sure - just not as refined as Recursion.

We don't have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem.

I wanted a straight forward easy read that was entertaining and Upgrade delivered. The writing was easy to follow and I could manage with only reading a chapter in a day or settle in for longer reading sessions without problems.

The pacing of the story was quick and I didn't find the pseudoscience to be overly heavy either. There was a nice bit of emotion and in the end the story delivered an interesting observation about the lack of compassion in society.

Upgrade is not his previous two books I recently read, Recursion, or Dark Matter. Upgrade seemed to me uninspired. It felt to me like he needed to write another book, so came up with this story, rather than the other way around, where he had a story he wanted to tell, and so wrote a book. It was OK to read though.

On one hand, I ripped through this book in literally less than 24 hours. (Guessing it was 5 or so hours of reading.) On the other, this is a deeply flawed book in so many ways.

If I were rating this on sheer readability, and my own compulsion to finish the novel, it'd be 5 stars. If I were rating it on concept and impressiveness of its ideas, it might get 0.5.

Just, please remind me to never, EVER, write a story where the premise is the character is smarter than everyone else. I just think, it's likely that it's an impossible task. Because, as an author, you have to think of every possibility that your readers might think of, and (somehow!?) believe that your ideas, the ones you write your supergenius having, are going to be believably smarter than all of them. There's just so much arrogance there. So much hubris. Imagine thinking you wrote a character whose actions telegraph an intelligence greater than all of your readers! Imagine!

So yeah, there were several points where I felt like the main character, who supposedly now has an IQ over 200, just didn't take any time at all to consider any alternatives to their actions. Even giving the author the benefit of the doubt, assuming the character did the equivalent to planning for months in the blink of an eye, I still think there were several painfully dumb decisions depicted.

And one of the dumbest is in the very end of the novel, revealed in the epilogue. A thing that it's revealed the character does that is possibly one of the my least favorite conclusions to a novel that I've ever read. It's just painful to me how bad I think it is.

On one hand, I ripped through this book in literally less than 24 hours. (Guessing it was 5 or so hours of reading.) On the other, this is a deeply flawed book in so many ways.

If I were rating this on sheer readability, and my own compulsion to finish the novel, it'd be 5 stars. If I were rating it on concept and impressiveness of its ideas, it might get 0.5.

Just, please remind me to never, EVER, write a story where the premise is the character is smarter than everyone else. I just think, it's likely that it's an impossible task. Because, as an author, you have to think of every possibility that your readers might think of, and (somehow!?) believe that your ideas, the ones you write your supergenius having, are going to be believably smarter than all of them. There's just so much arrogance there. So much hubris. Imagine thinking you wrote a character whose actions telegraph an intelligence greater than all of your readers! Imagine!

So yeah, there were several points where I felt like the main character, who supposedly now has an IQ over 200, just didn't take any time at all to consider any alternatives to their actions. Even giving the author the benefit of the doubt, assuming the character did the equivalent to planning for months in the blink of an eye, I still think there were several painfully dumb decisions depicted.

And one of the dumbest is in the very end of the novel, revealed in the epilogue. A thing that it's revealed the character does that is possibly one of the my least favorite conclusions to a novel that I've ever read. It's just painful to me how bad I think it is.

A short fun read with a similar trying-to-put-the-genie-back-in-the-bottle plot to the author's other recent releases. I found the final resolution more satisfying than I expected.

Like with other Blake Crouch books, I find some of the character decisions a bit off (decisions don't feel like they fit to me), and fixed so the plot can progress. I find his characters relationships with each other to be wanting.

The ideas are really fun though, and like his other books they are really easy and enjoyable to get through.

I recommend this though, it's like a half Flowers for Algernon

Rounding down to 2 stars. The middle of the book especially showed some promise but I think it gets a title too caught up in its own comic-book-ish plot. There’s too much action with too little meaning, and the “climax” was the least interesting part of the entire book. I like the message of the ending, but honestly I was disappointed by the e tire last third of the book. I don’t feel like this book explored the ideas it presents as interestingly or as thoroughly as Crouch’s previous books did the ideas they centered around. It’s just… a bit of a flop.

A fun book with an interesting premise, but it veers into a straight up action thriller when I would have preferred more science fiction. I was actually rooting for the antagonist the whole time and the story of their success and it's aftermath would have been a much more interesting story. Instead we follow the story of a reluctant fascist. Still a fun read, and I flew through it, I just wish more was done with the concept. Dark Matter and Recursion felt like they more fully explored their ideas, so I would rank them higher than this one.