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Book notes - Upgrade, by Blake Crouch
Upgrade, by Blake Crouch is another holiday book, I think. It's quite fast-paced and not too demanding. It's also quite fun seeing all the conventions of the action/adventure genre here - page after page consists of almost every paragraph having only one sentence, there's lots of impressive-sounding acronyms, and an obsession with telling us the details of exactly how many rounds of ammunition every weapon has. The biology side is almost a red herring!
That said, the idea of the genetic upgrade of the title, while not universal, is well-travelled. A E van Vogt wrote a number of books years ago tackling sub-species of humans, more advanced in some way (Slan and Silkie come to mind, along with his Null-A series). More recently Ted Chiang's Understand (one of the stories in Stories of Your Life and Others) likewise, but the focus in each is different. van Vogt wanted to look at social conflict between the groups, especially where the "normal" majority wanted to suppress the "superior" new group. Chiang is more similar to Crouch - he assumed a hormone treatment rather than genetics, and covered it in a short story, but the crux of it is a conflict between two recipients of the same treatment, and whether either is more entitled to run the world.
So again Upgrade is a kind of read-once and enjoy it for what it is book - personally I don't think you'd get much more out of a second reading. A bit like some of Tom Clancy's books, it's a way for people to read action/adventure with a slightly futuristic slant, with almost all of the story being recognisably from today plus a few years of fairly obvious dystopian shift. Probably the biggest bit of world-building is the idea that an attempted genetic modification of a food crop went terribly wrong thus leading to a) mass starvation and b) distrust of and heavy policing of genetic mods in general. You could cheerfully recommend it to folk who like action/adventure and know that they're going to recognise all the tropes and not be put off by Weird Stuff!
A fascinating side-effect of reading the books you kindly pass on has been a clearer understanding on my part of the conventions of genre. What one might call "proper" SF or fantasy has a clear sense of world-building that is crucial for the plot and characters, whereas lots of these cross-genre books are content to set themselves just a few years away, do a bit of hand waving, use a bit of technobabble, and rely on the fact that their readers aren't really looking for SF/F as such.
So the one I have just started (Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - of which more in a few days) is absolutely SF, and celebrates it by filling in as part of the narrative how human society has adapted itself using a kind of caste system to the loss of planet Earth and the constraints of living on an asteroid habitat. It comes over as entirely credible and well-thought through, and in particular not based on early 21st century society! I don't yet know whether the book as a whole will be successful, but the ways in which she is bringing the social and historical background to life are excellent.
Likewise Ordinary Monsters gradually filled in details of this alternate Late Victorian world in an engaging and credible way - in keeping with its central mystery approach, you didn't get to learn all about everything at the start... important facts were withheld or only alluded to at first before being steadily revealed.
Upgrade doesn't both with such niceties - there certainly are mysteries, relating to the Cunning Plan that the main character's mother had dreamed up, but the world itself is just there and immediately recognisable.
So yes, a book to recommend to particular kinds of reader in particular situations.
Comments
This is why I have pretty much given up on so-called genre books. It's not worth separating the wheat from the chaff.
I would say that "proper" SF is simply a novel / novella / short story where a key "idea" of a possible outcome from a scientific culture is explained, which provides the frame for plots, characterisation, etc.. "Genre" substitutes mostly well-worn tropes for ideas. e.g. your mini-review of Andy Weir's book. That's why PKD is a great SF writer, even though (IMO) not really that good a writer, whereas Weir is a hack, even though a "better" writer.
Also, the short sentence / paragraph thing you mention has become something I use to avoid a book. Worthwhile ideas cannot be presented like that, so when a story is written mostly that way, there will be no worthwhile ideas in it, say 999,999 times out of a million.
I mostly agree with this, especially the point about worthwhile ideas not being presentable in one-sentence paragraphs. One of the interesting things for me about this exercise with our local bookshop is what the guy there thinks of as SF/F as opposed to what I think of. And as a corollary, how people writing in quite different genres are experimenting with SF-like ideas as part of the plot. As yet I haven't really found many of these to be satisfying in my terms, but presumably they are appealing to a market of people used to those conventions and tropes.
People writing books that are a semblance of SF without really feeling like SF seems to be a theme lately. I said much the same about that Aliette de Bodard novel, and I often feel this way about contemporary SF. I attribute this to TV/Film. In the 60's and 70's and even 80's, SF in film and TV was still pretty thin on the ground, and it was recognizably campy and pulpy. Since then, though, with the proliferation first of cable channels, then with streaming, SF on TV has become much more mainstream, and this has opened the world of SF to a lot of new authors. Some have only ever really experienced SF in this manner. Others are so embedded in the culture (Black Crouch is a script-writer first, novelist second, if I recall from his bio) that he's stuck in that paradigm. What TV is really good at is taking the trappings of something and making an entertaining story. It's less good at capturing the 'speculative' parts of SF, which I think is why we so frequently hear people say 'the book is better than the movie'. Of course, there are exceptions, and this lecture series I mentioned does a very good job of explaining the meaning behind a lot of SF - and he mainly deals with film/tv!: https://www.audible.ca/pd/Sci-Phi-Science-Fiction-as-Philosophy-Audiobook/B07CZ28Z5D?ref=a_library_t_c5_libItem_B07CZ28Z5D_14&pf_rd_p=9262d717-a682-4b54-8e37-a6039fe5956e&pf_rd_r=1GH3YASG1ACFHM75TZMW&pageLoadId=KPZ6DYfhRYNcBxmt&creativeId=4ee810cf-ac8e-4eeb-8b79-40e176d0a225