A book club pick 😉

After two books, I knew what I was getting into with Crouch – a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that is sure to entertain, in one way or another. I really liked Recursion; I liked Dark Matter a lot less; this one falls somewhere in between.

It’s a near future setting, and the climate change is slowly wrecking everything. Also, scientists have been very naughty with genetic engineering, and now this kind of thing is banned, banned, banned. (Me: stupid, stupid, stupid.) There is a Gene Protection Agency in the US, hunting rogue scientists and other disobedient citizens who want to do gene therapy, create new life forms etc. Logan is a GPA agent – one day, he walks into a trap and gets infected with an influenza virus. The virus is carrying stuff that is going to alter Logan’s genome in exciting ways. Don’t you just hate it when this happens?

Logan starts getting smarter, stronger, etc. There is a conspiracy, of course. We get fugitives on the run, secrets revealed, cat-and-mouse games, lots of action. Stuff keeps happening!

The books asks some interesting questions. What does humanity deserve? Or doesn’t deserve? What price would you pay to “save everyone”?

“Being smart doesn’t make people infallible. It just makes them more dangerous.”

But we don’t go very deeply into these themes. So I think I would have preferred less philosophy and more sci-fi thriller candy.

The body count is high, people die in gruesome ways. It’s all very “technical”, like a video game. It bothered me.

Also, this is the third book by Crouch featuring a man forcibly separated from his family/loved ones. This is getting old…

By the end of the book, the plot moves too fast to make sense at times. Maybe Logan had gotten so smart that I couldn’t keep up?

I liked the ending, but I am not sure how I feel about it. ( )

I loved Dark Matter and several other of this authors books. This one just didn’t entertain me at all. Slow and uneventful. ( )

This is not my usual genre but I found it an exciting and somewhat frightening look into the futuristic advances in science and technology. Logan Ramsay is an agents who work for GPA, Gene Protection Agency. He becomes involved in an effort to amend the sins of his mother, Miriam Ramsay, a scientist involved with a genetic modification project. He feels compelled to correct his family's horrific legacy which explores the limits of humanity. He wants to protect his wife, Beth and daughter, Ava. While leading a raid on a suspected gene laboratory Logan is fortunate to survive an explosion. Or is he? Just as he begins to feel better he realizes that he is almost feeling "too good" in that his thinking is clearer and sharper than it was before the accident. Logan eventually realizes that he has been taken to a lab as a subject for a gene altering project on humans. Although his mother died, he can't help but think that he is being used to advance his mother's trials on altering human genomes. It is a thought provoking journey about the capabilities that might exist and the questionable moral responsibility attached. ( )

1.5 ( )

Interesting premise but felt too drawn out to me. Author's random descriptions also sometimes felt odd to me. Crouch also didn't add much new discussion to this premise. IMO Ted Chiang's Division by Zero is a more emotional and well-executed short story about this idea. ( )