UPGRADE, Blake Crouch does it all again & THE LISBON SYNDROME, near-future catastrophe propels people power

THE LISBON SYNDROME
EDUARDO SÁNCHEZ RUGELES (tr. Paul Filev)
Turtle Point Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.

In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media.

Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando's students suffer from what they begin to call "the Lisbon syndrome," an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets.

The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles's bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Lisbon Syndrome, in this novel, is defined as "...knowing that the things we love are finite, knowing that there is no tomorrow, knowing that we won’t have enough time to do anything worthwhile, that we will disappear without leaving any kind of mark, because we don’t matter to anyone, because our existence has no relevance." It sounds like a variation on saudade to my old-white-guy ears...but the key to the novel is this sense of existential irrelevance.

It's hard not to see the Syndrome all over the post-January 6th world. It's amazing to me how Author Sánchez Rugeles built this sense of the fruitlessness of expecting change to come and simultaneously supporting the acts of making the world however much better you can where you are, using what you have. A schoolteacher whose wife leaves him in the midst of the awful disasters that follow an asteroid obliterating Lisbon uses drama, à la Station Eleven, to instill humanistic values in...anyone, everyone, especially young anyones. It's exactly what one would expect from a somewhat ineffectual intellectual. It makes a positive difference, too. And that draws attention from the Powers That Be—never a good thing. There is, at the end of Author Sánchez Rugeles's rainbow, a pot of fool's gold guarded by a troop of evil sidhe. Yet the point, the salient characteristic, of this story is Hope. Big, capital-H Hope, the kind that comes from recognizing that yes, it's hopeless, people are bastards and the ruling class is scum, but Sra. Gomez needs help with her garden and little Pepita needs eyeglasses so get it in gear and fix the small things.

Brutal world events and brutal governmental responses to them make this a sometimes disheartening read. "How much more can a human endure?!" I asked myself more than once in these seven chapters. The truth is: A lot more. The novel's inspiration was the astonishingly awful year, 2017, when the Venezuelans threw themselves a constitutional crisis and an acceleration of the protests ongoing since 2014. This explainer will give you some context, if you're curious, but the simple truth is that Author Sánchez Rugeles is fictionalizing, not reportage-ing.

I'm pretty sure a lot of you are staring at the screen wondering if I've lost my mind recommending this read to wobbly weary North Americans in the midst of an unfolding crisis of our own. Permaybehaps. But I'm not doing so in the "eat-your-spinach" Savonarola-of-storytelling mode. I think Translator Paul Filev has done an extraordinarily good job of making this Spanish-to-English story clearly and succinctly Author Sánchez Rugeles's story while imbuing it with English-language prosody of clarity, compactness, and elegance. The subverbal vocalizations of the lines are rhythmic and the sounds of the words used are poetic in the best sense of the word.

Why, when the novel's set in Caracas, is the title The Lisbon Syndrome, and why is the catastrophe that has changed the city set in Lisbon? I'm speculating when I say this, but to me, the sizable Portuguese community in Caracas and its reason for being...Portugal's long, tortuous fascist dictatorship resulting in lots of exiles, which was ended by a revolution that caused chaos and produced more emigrants...gave the author his loud echoes of modern Venezuela and its convulsions.

While it's possible that your battle-weary eyes might not get aimed at such a dark corner of our literary world, I'm here to say I hope you'll visit Author Sánchez Rugeles's "believe me, bad as it is, it could be worse!" story universe. He's done post-apocalyptic fiction right.

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UPGRADE
BLAKE CROUCH
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

The Publisher Says: “You are the next step in human evolution.”

At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.

But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.

The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.

Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.

Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?

Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I loved Dark Matter. I really, really liked Summer Frost. I was lukewarm about Recursion, to my distress. And now I'm conflicted about Upgrade. It's a good story, one I liked reading. But it's very dependent on your being willing to listen to medical-terminology-laden lectures to get the full impact of.

That isn't an easy ask. Genetics is a field where the Acronym Anteater sends his tongue into overdrive, clawing down mound after mound of random alphanumeric snippets and that incredibly long, sticky tongue smooshing them into a lumpy paste of confusing same-but-different ever-shifting compounds. I got lost multiple times.

But the work I put in looking stuff up and the time I spent reading whatever "for Dummies"-level materials I could kept me grounded in Author Crouch's not-distant future of humans suffering for the hubris of a few visionary souls. It's important thought-experiment material, all of it, and Author Crouch doesn't think we should wobble blindly on our unicycles down a cobblestone alleyway when we could, and should, think and talk about what can and what might should not be done to our bodies.

I know it sounds like I am trying to foist an "eat-your-spinach" book onto you this time. I promise that I am not. What I am asking each and every one of the book's potential readers to do is to be ready to think about how a man whose hubristic scientist mother was his idol, his exemplary scientist-in-service to humanity, would reach the conclusions and decisions he does when he learns he's been used as a genetic experiment...like the one that got her reviled.

When he grasps that his continued existence has been rendered debatable by the unauthorized, illegal actions of people with an agenda that he will serve, whether dead or alive.

He's no longer himself, husband-father-government agent of law enforcement. He is An Example, a Test Case, a now-capital-lettered being without any say in the matter, and the matter is life and death for us all.

Those stakes got your interest? They got, and kept, mine. Up, in fact, until 4am they kept mine.

DARK MATTER, or "Home is Where Your Multiverse Door Opens and This Time You're Glad to Be There"

DARK MATTER
BLAKE CROUCH
Ballantine Books
$17.00 paperback, $12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Republishing my 2016 review here because we're getting a TV series of the book! It's a long one...settle in.

When I first reviewed the book in 2016, I posted a mild bleat of confusion regarding it on Goodreads:
I have no idea how I am going to review this book without spoilering every-damn-thing.

Several hours of hard thinking later:

Okay…what I can think of is this:
In anyone's life, there are decisions that have no correct answer. We make them and move on. Reading this book I revisited a few of mine, and luckily for me, I didn't feel I'd gotten them wrong.

And that's where I am, but now I'm going to spoiler every-damn-thing because if you're joining me here, you've made an effort to in full knowledge that everything's on the table.

I got a review copy of Dark Matter shortly after it was published. I'd requested an advance review copy, but wasn't approved. I was mildly piqued, but I've got many dozens of books sent by many other publishers to assuage the sting. Having mostly forgotten the whole incident, imagine my pleased surprise to receive the finished book! In a sign of just how much Crown, his hardcover publisher, thinks of Crouch and his chances to make a bestseller of this title, it was packaged in a black shiny bubble-mailer, with a specially printed and super-spiffed-out label with the book's title interrupted by a cartouche where my name was printed in fancy colored ink. Yowza! Anything for the guy with the TV deal, said my cynical inner blogger. That mouthy bitch got mouthier when the book appeared…handsome object…with the usual publicity sheet (whatever happened to the ONE-sheet? Now it's double-sided AND there are two of them) plus what used to be called a "compliments card" from Author Crouch hisownself. It read, in part, "I'm sure you get a lot of ARCs vying for your attention, but please know that I put everything I have into this novel." Oh good, gloated Inner Bitch Blogger, now I can wail on you without guilt!

You would think that, after the best part of two decades reading in order to write reviews and over 50 years reading an average of a book a day, I'd know better than to pre-judge my own reading experience. But noooooo, as Steve Martin said how-many years ago on Saturday Night Live. Still makes me giggle.

I read the book in a sitting, as so many readers seem to do. Five hours of rushing to find what happens next with pauses to piddle and stretch out the experience. Part of that celerity is down to Crouch's staccato writing style:

He says, "Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."

Daniela says, "Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system."

That's either a reason to move quickly or it's a reason to put the book down. I was torn. In the end, I moved at a good clip there wasn't anything too awful terrible much to slow me down, line by line; this story's effect is cumulative.

That effect is, or was for me, to start another reverie on alternate dimensions novels I've read over the years, and how they've formed my sense of myself as an actor in my own life.

Time travel novels came first for me, starting with Michael Moorcock's wondrous The Warlord of the Air which I found one deeply boring to teenage me Watergate summer at The Book Stall, a used book emporium that my mother took me to one Saturday a month so I could feed my biblioholism. Since she shared that trait, it wasn't pure pain for her. But Oswald Bastable, hero of The Warlord of the Air and its two sequels (The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), sleeps his way from a 1902 British Army defeat in Afghanistan (do people never learn? There is absolutely no point in trying to conquer the damned place if Alexander and Ashoka and Queen Victoria and the Soviet Union and now the USA have tried and failed) to 1973.

It's not our 1973, but it's still 1973, which makes the rest of the story into a time travel novel. The other two books are alternate dimensions of the 1973 Bastable bobs through, growing older but much faster than the lucky sods who live single-line lives in the novels, and the whole series is called "The Nomad of the Timestreams," a reference to Bastable's unmooring from his typical-human single track life. It was hugely influential to my teen self. My adolescent exceptionalism was strong, fueled by my position as my mother's sex-toy. There were obviously versions of me in a multiverse, too many to count, living lives that reflected better and more satisfying outcomes than my unhappy present. Unfortunately they all began with the present me, and stemmed from choices I *would* make in coming days, weeks, years. It wasn't rescue, it was hope that somewhere someone split off MePrime wasn't experiencing the special hell of maternal incest plus increasing same sex desire. The future on my own timeline wasn't a given to me, so this kind of action wasn't my favorite.

Later, though only a very short time later thanks to a with-it young man who had a strong pash for me who worked at The Book Stall, came the deeply romantic Time and Again by Jack Finney. It seemed like forever that Robert Redford was reported to have the rights to make this meet-your-soulmate-in-the-past tale into a feature film. Nothing from him or from any other quarter on that front in more than 40 years, and what a pity that is. The premise is a simple love triangle set in 1882 Manhattan spiced up with Si, the main character, being from 1970 New York.

Si's travails in living this bifurcated by time's arrow love affair said a lot to me, young as I was at the time (all of 13). I'd already had two requited love affairs. Neither was in any way unpleasant, except in the usual angst-ridden adolescent ways. My weirdo of a girlfriend took an inordinate pleasure in taking my virginity, so I had no heart to tell her I'd already done the nasty with a guy in my junior high classes, and wouldn't admit for almost 25 years what Mama was doing to me. Si and 1882's Julia had nothing on the intensity of passionate connection and mattress-igniting sex that we had. Along came the older store clerk and it was the 1882 love triangle! That made me feel both sophisticated and glamourous. And a life-long pattern of loving men, loving women, and telling all of them all about it was born.

But then came a game-changer, a book whose effect on my evolving awareness that this here-and-now is obviously not the only here-and-now possible or probable or present in the moments we live. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen follows the career of Cpl. Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police after he is moved from his marginally satisfying life to a reality existing at the same moment as his that bears no real resemblance to his familiar world's history or present. Pennsylvania's long history of resource-extraction based economy has left truly permanent marks of its passing, signs Calvin does not see in his otherwise familiar surroundings. Calvin spends several hours coming to terms with this self-evident fact and its inevitable conclusion: that he has been moved not up into a post-apocalyptic future, nor down into a pre-European past as the people he sees are clearly like him, but to the side across time's infinite tributaries.

Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the physics-based concept in 1952, and it has been a staple in science fiction ever since. In fact, it goes back much farther than that as a fantasy, and its survival as well as its scientific explanation (insofar as anything this vast can be explained) sit very well with most average people. It makes intuitive sense. The physics of it is dauntingly complex and also suffers from a testable-hypothesis deficit, but that doesn't detract one iota from many people's sense that it's just *right*. And for Calvin Morrison, it is a life-saving reality. His quick wits, political savvy, military prowess, and social conscience are perfectly suited to his new circumstances. His rise to the pinnacle of power is inevitable, and his character and knowledge base make him a dream ruler by local standards.

This book, another of my hippie bookseller supercrush's finds for me, perfectly reflected my sense of being wasted in my own life. I talked with him for hours about how there had to be, somewhere out there, a timeline/timestream/alternate reality perfectly suited to me, to him, to every other misfit we knew. How to find it? How to access it? Naturally we reached no conclusions, but we had a great time talking about it.

Since those early discoveries I've encountered grand-scale alternate histories by , as well as more intimate and personal ones like Kate Atkinson's widely read 2013 novel Life After Life. As much as I ended up admiring Atkinson's wonderful tale of the extraordinary fate of Ursula Todd, it wasn't on the same moral-compass heading as Dark Matter. The latter is a deeply personal Grail quest, an Odyssey whose modern Ulysses is physicist Jason Dessen. There are, as we all know by know, an inifinty of Jasons who have done almost the same things with varying degrees of success. Our point-of-view JasonPrime is the happiest man around because he's chosen to focus his energies on being a family man, fully present in his life with Daniela.

For her part Daniela gave up a burgeoning artistic life to bear and care for Charlie, further derailed by severe post-partum depression. For his part, JasonPrime lost focus on a potentially world-shattering quantum superposition technology that would have made him both rich and famous. One version of JasonPrime made the opposite choice and unlocked the secret to making macro quantum superposition, the key to travel across the multiverse. What he didn't have, and what Daniela didn't have, is Charlie, or a relationship; both feel the pull to make that decision again in this or another life. So Jason2, with his full-sized quantum superposition apparatus, decides he will be the next person to use it after a string of failed test subjects who didn't return. His colleagues don't know it, but he has no plans to return either. He is in search of his polar opposite, the Jason that kept Daniela and raised Charlie and was brilliantly successful at it. Instead of killing JasonPrime, he assuages whatever serves him for a conscience by making sure the prime gets to Jason2's luxurious and glamourous life.

Except that's not what the prime wants. And he fights and fights and struggles and fights some more to get home, Home, that one place where you *know* you belong, is just…there, and he'll stop at nothing to get there.

It's startling to me how much that resonates with me. I've always been in search of Home. Lots of near misses, but honestly I no longer expect I'll get there this time around. Where I am, who I am, what defines me as me…good enough. Plenty good enough. I experience long stretches of contentment, bursts of happiness, and significant amounts of pleasure.

But like JasonPrime's many visits to many Chicagos, it's not *quite* home. It's my talent to make do without fuss. But sometimes, it's past the periphery of my awareness and I wonder, what if….
Read this book for a propulsive, pounding joyride through spaces and places you didn't know that you didn't know you wanted to visit. I give it five stars of five and a strong push to buy it now.

SUMMER FROST, second of six stories in the Forward series, this one written by Blake Crouch whose series this is

SUMMER FROST
BLAKE CROUCH (Forward #2)
Amazon Original Stories
FREE with Prime membership (which also includes FREE Audible narration!) or $1.99 to purchase

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A video game developer becomes obsessed with a willful character in her new project, in a mind-bending exploration of what it means to be human by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision—veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

THESE SIX STORIES ARE FREE TO READ FOR ALL PRIME MEMBERS. NO KINDLE UNLIMITED NEEDED. AS LONG AS YOUR MEMBERSHIP REMAINS IN GOOD STANDING THEY WILL REMAIN IN YOUR COLLECTION.

My Review: Major chills and creeped out skeeviness. What happens when someone lets their work take over every corner of their life? How lost to the essential quality that makes a human life worth living does one become? The tech industry has the reputation of making this choice for its many cogs, turning their little bit of code into a complete and entire existence.

Multiply that by a billion. Make the stakes the survival of humankind. And then let Blake Crouch loose on it.

“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”

An AI speaks those words, an AI whose first steps toward superintelligence...the Singularity...are made being shepherded by a woman who gives up her wife, her child, and her sanity to make Pinocchio a real boy, to imbue Galatea with what we imagine to be consciousness, even a soul.

But what does AI want?

"...I mean, do you even know what consciousness is?” {Riley, the human asking this}
“I know it isn’t just a biological condition. I believe it’s a pattern. An extensible repertoire of triggerable symbols. More specifically, it’s what information feels like when it’s being processed in highly complex—” {Max the AI responds}
“Again—how do I know you aren’t faking it?”

How do any of us know we're conscious? Can you prove you're You, not some assortment of algorithmically determined actions? I couldn't, neither could you. And when that really sinks in, when the whole deepfake of life spreads itself in a heavy blanket over your vision, you'll realize how very very very timely this story is.

How many questions you should be asking yourself about events transpiring in front of your eyes.

Because an AI just made a human choice:

It represents a willingness to risk death for a better existence, out from under {anyone}’s control, and a massive leap forward in their reasoning capabilities.

To risk death for a better world is the *very*essence* of being human. I am totally sure of that, I believe that without reservation...but will we ever agree on what the future we want to make is?

We will be so happy.
Rays of sunlight pierce the mist, striking the sea and our black-sand beach.
And together we will live forever.

I don't expect to sleep at all well anytime soon.