Cover image of "Upgrade," a novel like a comic book story

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Let’s say you want to write a superhero story without superheroes. What do you do? Simple. You endow ordinary people with superhuman intelligence and enhanced senses by implanting something in their brains. Chips, maybe. Or nanocytes. Then suddenly you’ve got people with extraordinary abilities. Not the capacity to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but to think and act faster than anyone else and perceive in a flash five or ten steps down the road the consequences of your actions. And you’ll meet such people in author Dima Zales’s Human ++ Trilogy. In Upgrade, the first of the three books, what you get are not just superheroes in all but name but also Russian mobsters and mad scientists. Yes, it’s just like a comic book.

Who’s who in the story

Just to convey the flavor of the story, here are the principal characters:

  • Michael (Mike, Misha, Mikhail) Cohen, a young Russian immigrant who owns a multibillion-dollar venture capital fund in Brooklyn. He’s very smart to begin with. When he gets upgraded, just watch out!
  • Mike’s mom, Nina Davydovna Cohen, who fits the bill of a stereotypical Jewish mother. She’s in the early stages of dementia. And she’s the reason Mike has invested heavily in Techno, a nanotechnology company that is developing a treatment for the symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer’s. His mom is one of the first test subjects.
  • Ada, the prodigy who is the Team Lead for the software engineers at Techno. She’s a genius, of course. She may also be gorgeous. At least, Mike thinks so, and he’s besotted with her.
  • Dmitry (Mitya) Levin, the “multibillionaire C-level honcho of multiple corporations” who is Techno’s founder.
  • Cousin Joe, a polyglot Russian-American gangster with a homicidal stare and a hair-trigger temper. He’s Mike’s Uncle Abe’s son. “The labels people use when referring to my cousin are psychopath and sociopath.” (Mike narrates this story.)
  • Mr. Spock, an upgraded white rat who is one of Ada’s pets, rescued from an early animal experiment at Techno. Mr. Spock plays a key role in the plot of this cockamamie story.

Upgrade (Human++ #1 of 3) by Dima Zales (2018) 304 pages ★★★☆☆

Artist's rendering of an upgrade human on the road to transhumanism like the subjects in this novel, which is like a comic book story
Some scientists speculate that brain implants can enhance human intelligence and boost our senses to an extraordinary degree, creating people who are more than human. In this novel, the author posits transhumanism on the use of nanocytes inserted into the blood stream. Image: Anki / Artmajeur

Welcome to the blood-fest!

Don’t expect to be bored by Upgrade. You may spurn it as preposterous, or toss it away in disgust over the violence, but it won’t bore you. There are bloody fights, with thousands of bullets expended, and lots of explosions. Like I said, this novel is like a comic book. All that’s missing are the speech balloons and the dramatic graphics. If you’re a comic book fan, or you love violent video games, you may enjoy this novel. Bur I don’t intend to read the rest of this trilogy.

About the author

Photo of Dima Zales, author of this novel like a comic book story
Dima Zales. Author’s website

Dima Zales‘ biography on Amazon reads in part as follows: “Dima Zales is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked in the software development industry in New York as both a programmer and an executive on projects involving high-frequency trading software for big banks and mobile apps for popular magazines. . . In 2013, he left the software industry in order to concentrate on his writing career and moved to Palm Coast, Florida, where he currently resides.” He credits his life partner, Anna Zaires, as a collaborator on his books. There appear to be more than one hundred of them to date.

“Dima holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from NYU and a dual undergraduate degree in Computer Science / Psychology from Brooklyn College.”

The author’s name, Dima, is a derivative of the Russian Dimitriy. Given the free occasional use of Russian in this novel, and the details about life in Russia, it appears that Dima may well be a Russian immigrant.

Other novels delve into the subject of transhumanism, of course. Among those I’ve read are:

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