Uprade by Blake Crouch

 

On the one hand, this reads a lot like a techno-thriller--and my experience is that any time one of those ventures into any area I know anything about, they manage to get it badly wrong; on the other hand, the setting, all plausible and recognizable near-future, isn't any worse, really, than Dick or most cyberpunk when they were written: I guess it's more in the SF direction than a lot of techno-thrillers tend to be, and it seems as though Crouch has done his research--at least enough so his characters don't come across as total idiots--so I can't snark more than a little on most of the choices, really. I can say, though, that marketing it as near-future SF would be more honest than anything else, really; I grabbed this book off the library shelves because the cover copy made it seem to me as though it was set in more or less the now, not some twenty-ish years in the future (maybe more like fifty). In some ways, the world of the author's setting contains too much that is recognizable, given the amount of mostly-destructive change it's gone through. I'm pleased that Crouch moved away from pure intelligence being the solution to the problems of the novel, though I'm not sure I entire buy the solutions he posited, either. At least he seemed to be committed to the novel being what it was.