Daniels, Ezra Claytan – Upgrade Soul

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Upgrade Soul

It seems like I’m on a roll recently with reconnecting with comics artists past, people whose work I’ve enjoyed but lost track of over the years. I loved Changers, another series of Ezra’s, but it seemed to vanish. Well, after reading his website I now know that it just moved on to a series of other mediums, much like this story was apparently an interactive app for years before the book was published. I’m very much a “published work” kind of guy, so I’ll just focus my comments on that. Because when it comes to the story itself, this one is in a league of its own. Stunning, inventive, viscerally disturbing, oddly hopeful at times while completely hopeless at others, it’s yet another difficult book to talk about without giving some things away, and this time I’m going to do that. So if you’re just looking for the gist: this is an incredible science fiction story that everyone who can read should check out. Clear enough? This is the story of a retired couple with money who end up funding a controversial project with the condition that they be the first test subjects. The project? Human cloning. But upgraded human cloning, meaning the new versions would be better in every way than the old ones. This is slowly established (unless you’re one of those dummies who reads the back of the book first; don’t do that to yourself), and the slow burn is what makes it all the more horrifying. As this is the first test of the process, things go wrong in unexpected ways. The clones come out (for lack of a better term) half-baked, not fully formed, looking more like potatoes than people. And there’s also the unexpected fact that they can’t be very far from their clones without both of them falling ill and possibly even dying. The bulk of the book is about the elderly, frail humans getting to know their other selves; the differences, the similarities, where it all went wrong in their lives and how their clones could do better. I’d recommend this book for the conversations alone (neither of the humans are dummies, but they’re still outclassed compared to their clones), but every aspect of the story comes together so beautifully, I’m able to unreservedly recommend the whole thing. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and this is coming from somebody who’s sick of clones in stories and thought there was no new narrative ground left to cover. Wrong again! $19.99