His criminal past catching up with him, a troubled young man seeks escape into digital utopia by uploading his consciousness into a computer -- just as first love casts his life in a new light. In this thrilling near-future science-fiction novel, Mark McClelland explores the immense potential of computer-based consciousness and the philosophical perils of simulated society.
To escape the hacker crimes of his youth, Raymond Quan has worked out a brilliant but extremely risky scheme. Taking advantage of his position on the University of Michigan’s Human Mind Upload Project, he plans to upload his consciousness into a computer, but make it look like it failed. It will appear to others that he died, and he can secretly whisk himself off to a remote computer and live out his life in a virtual world of his own creation, free from society and the far-reaching eye of the law.
In the midst of all this, he works up the courage to reach out to Anya, an attractive and outgoing scientist on the upload research team, and much to his surprise he discovers the attraction is mutual. He finds himself entering the first meaningful relationship of his life just as pressures force him to accelerate his already-dangerous upload plan or risk a long prison sentence. To make matters worse, the technology he intends to use has not yet been tested on humans — he would be the first person to make the jump to a pure-digital mind.
McClelland’s ambitious debut novel envisions a future in which the vanishing line between virtual reality and “organic life” causes an antisocial genius to conduct the ultimate evolutionary experiment… The author has a particular gift for describing the technological advances, brand names, pop-cultural references and unique detritus of a society dependent on machines for survival and ravaged by virtual-reality addiction… McClelland’s slick imagination remains in full gear until the novel’s unpredictable conclusion. A thoughtful tale resembling a sci-fi video game viewed in a funhouse mirror. –Kirkus Indie
Excerpt
My name is Raymond Quan. I am human. I am computer.
Professional Reviews
Thought-provoking, yet accessible. Highly recommended.
Upload by Mark McClelland is a complex and thought--provoking, yet accessible foray into the life of a brilliant but troubled young man, Raymond Quan, and his quest to escape from a world that has done little to inspire loyalty in the orphaned engineer.
It almost troubles me to call this a story of science fiction -- it begins about fifty years from today, but the subject matter seems entirely plausible and may be mirrored in reality much sooner. People in Raymond's time seek recreation, pleasure, and sometimes analogues of unremarkable everyday life in virtual reality environments that can be programmed with nearly limitless scenarios and environments.
It is not a stretch to see something similar soon coming to pass in our world, a world where many people are already living somewhat virtual lives through social networks and online gaming. If this virtual environment exists and we can interact with it, could we go one step further and live nearly full--time in this environment, extending our lives with machines; perhaps eventually eschewing the human body altogether and become immortal? If we can do such things, should we? These topics have been broached many times over the years, both in popular media and in non--fiction, but Upload presents a fresh perspective on what could otherwise be a tired subject, in a tangential way to Richard Powers' acclaimed 1995 work Galatea 2.2.
The author is not so broad as to leave the reader unfulfilled nor does he express the arrogance to provide a definitive map to the philosophical trails that we must all travel on our own.
The major attributes of Upload that prompted me to write this review are the overall existential and moral questions that the tale ponders. Very generally, what defines life, existence, love, conscience, and happiness? I personally identified with Raymond at several points in the story -- this caused me to critically examine my own psyche when he later thought or acted in ways contrary to how I think that I might behave in a similar situation. We are given insight to his growth over the years, and while I thought that the character development was a bit too rushed in the second half of the story, I was still in suspense until the bitter end on what I think is the key question -- will Raymond ever be able to connect with other people, and if not, will he care?
In concert with everything I have said above, not only did I finish Upload, I read it during nearly every free moment during less than thirty hours. As the hundreds of unfinished novels on my shelves will jealously attest, such a feat is quite extraordinary for me and is perhaps the greatest endorsement that I have to give.
I anxiously await Mr. McClelland's next novel. Read Upload -- you'll be glad you did.
--Jim Grisham
Move over Stephenson and Morgan, there's a new guy in town
Like Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash and Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, Upload is fast paced and full of action, a story-noire set in a not too distant dystopian society; and like Peter F. Hamilton's Void series, the characters and worlds are well developed and very believable.
Have you ever had a problem you wish you could run away from in hopes that it would just go away? Raymond finds himself in a situation where he not only wants to run from his myriad of problems, but he has also devised a way in which he can just `disappear' and leave everything--and everyone-- far behind.
As a young boy, he was essentially orphaned and spent most of his adolescent years growing up in state orphanages and group homes. He had no parental guidance and, short of loose supervision, very little adult guidance.
Early on he discovered he had a knack for programming and hacking, skills he later cultivated into both a job and profession. He landed his first job as a young teenager, building and maintaining the robots and computer systems of a wealthy elderly man whose only ambition was to spend every waking and sleeping moment in his VR chamber, held in the embrace of one virtual bimbo or another.
Using his exceptional computer skills, the boy hacks into his boss's VR chamber and records the man's every move in an attempt to create the perfect avatar: a computer likeness in the virtual world, indistinguishable from a human.
But then something terrible happens to the old man, and Raymond panics and makes a few...not so perfect...decisions.
Fast forward 9 years and Raymond, now on his own, has landed the perfect job: working in a university computer research laboratory-- the old man very much in the past and at the back of Raymond's mind.
Always a loner and never having experience love in any form, Raymond has devised a method to escape it all. The lab in which he works has developed a method to upload the consciousness of terminal animals, such that the now digitized creatures are unable to distinguish their new virtual realm from their former reality.
Having spent countless hours in the virtual realm, as well as having designed countless VR worlds himself, Raymond longs to shed his body and upload permanently, leaving his worldly cares--and past--behind.
In the middle of it all he discovers the one thing he failed to work into his mathematical equations.
Love.
At the last possible minute, and the worst possible time, Raymond falls for a beautiful co-worker as his hidden past creeps up on him.
Will he be able to pull off the ultimate getaway and escape his past? Or will his new found love help keep him rooted in the real world?
Upload is a well written story that not only tackles the scientific possibility of digitizing consciousness along with the ethical questions that arise with it, but it also asks the question : Can you really run from your past?
~~H. Wardle of 'The Triumph Detective' series
Kirkus Indie Review
McClelland's ambitious debut novel envisions a future in which the vanishing line between virtual reality and "organic life" causes an antisocial genius to conduct the ultimate evolutionary experiment.
In the mid-21st century, Raymond Quan is an expert hacker, the creator of virtual "v-worlds" and a member of the controversial, corporate-sponsored Human Mind Upload Project in Ann Arbor, Mich. He falls unexpectedly for a co-worker, Anya Cordovil, and works up the courage to ask her on a virtual date. He offers to teach her yoga, and the couple poses together in the same tropical v-world -- but from their separate v-chambers. Indeed, Raymond is so removed from "pre-virtual civilization" that he recalls the 1984 film The Karate Kid as "some old, 2-D movie." Later, Raymond refers to A Midsummer Night's Dream virtual mini-adventure and assumes that Shakespeare "was some sort of flowery-but-clever soft-porn script writer." When Anya asks Raymond on a real date, it terrifies him but leads to his first real kiss. Soon Raymond's shady hacker past catches up to him -- in the form of detectives and FBI agents -- and he decides to escape "reality prime" by illegally uploading his consciousness into Nurania, "a world of his own dark, mischievous inspirations, turned inside out." Things don't go as Raymond expects, as it turns out that his paradise has been programmed for destruction. Disembodied and tossed from avatar to avatar, Raymond tries desperately to get back to reality. Author McClelland clearly relishes the surreal universe he's invented, just as Raymond "savors the primitive richness of his organic life" and creates new personae and worlds with aplomb. The author has a particular gift for describing the technological advances, brand names, pop-cultural references and unique detritus of a society dependent on machines for survival and ravaged by virtual-reality addiction. Although the writing style can occasionally be a bit bland, McClelland's slick imagination remains in full gear until the novel's unpredictable conclusion.
A thoughtful tale resembling a sci-fi video game viewed in a funhouse mirror.
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