Robert Jackson Bennett’s LOCKLANDS (Del Rey, 546 pp., $28.99) concludes his Founders trilogy, an epic fantasy that blends Renaissance Italy aesthetics with the ingenuity of the industrial and computing revolutions to ask hard questions about late capitalism and the technology entwined with it. It’s not “Flowers for Algernon,” but if Michael Crichton had written a superhero novel, it would look a lot like “Upgrade.” This would be fine if Crouch weren’t foregrounding the emergent brilliance of his protagonist it’s a little frustrating to see so-called geniuses dramatically siloed off to work against each other, blind to the difference between a conversation and an irreconcilable ideological split. Logan as a son, a father, a brother, is much more interesting than Logan as an augmented warrior, and I appreciated how much that was part of the book’s design.īut while the novel raises several ethical and philosophical questions, it isn’t always interested in exploring them. “I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind,” says Logan, whose thoughtful, anguished perspective provides the book with much of its depth. “Upgrade” is sleek and propulsive, a page-turner with unexpectedly beautiful passages that give you pause amid the thrills. But while raiding a secret lab, he’s exposed to a designer virus that rewrites his DNA, making him stronger, faster and smarter, and embroiling him in a war for humanity’s future. Logan’s been trying to atone ever since - by helping the government hunt down rogue geneticists. While attempting to genetically modify rice, Ramsay’s mother, Miriam, provoked the Great Starvation: devastating the planet’s staple crops, killing millions of people and leading to the criminalization of gene editing. In Blake Crouch’s UPGRADE (Ballantine, 341 pp., $28), Logan Ramsay has seen firsthand what happens when you try to improve on nature. An evergreen question for our times: How do we fix the world?
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