A Calculated Life, Anne Charnock
A Calculated Life, Anne Charnock
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A Calculated Life

Author: Anne Charnock

Narrator: Susan Duerden

Unabridged: 6 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook (DRM Protected)

Published: 12/10/2013

Synopsis

Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel) AwardLate in the twenty-first century, big business is booming and state institutions are thriving thanks to advances in genetic engineering, which have produced a compliant population free of addictions. Violent crime is a rarity.Hyper-intelligent Jayna is a star performer at top predictive agency Mayhew McCline, where she forecasts economic and social trends. A brilliant mathematical modeler, she far outshines her co-workers, often correcting their work on the quiet. Her latest coup: finding a link between northeasterly winds and violent crime.When a string of events contradicts her forecasts, Jayna suspects she needs more data and better intuition. She needs direct interactions with the rest of society. Bravely—and naively—she sets out to disrupt her strict routine and stumbles unwittingly into a world where her IQ is increasingly irrelevant…a place where human relationships and the complexity of life are difficult for her to decode. And as she experiments with taking risks, she crosses the line into corporate intrigue and disloyalty.Can Jayna confront the question of what it means to live a “normal” life? Or has the possibility of a “normal” life already been eclipsed for everyone?

About Anne Charnock

Anne Charnock’s debut novel, A Calculated Life, was nominated for the 2013 Philip K Dick Award and the 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award (Debut Novel). Her writing career began in journalism. Her articles appeared in the Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. She was educated at the University of East Anglia, where she studied environmental sciences, and at the Manchester School of Art. She travelled widely as a foreign correspondent and spent a year trekking through Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya.In her fine art practice, she tried to answer the questions What is it to be human? What is it to be a machine? Ultimately she decided to write fiction as another route to finding answers.Anne is an active blogger and reviews fiction for the online magazine Strange Horizons. She contributes exhibition reviews and book recommendations to the Huffington Post. She splits her time between London and Chester and, whenever possible, she and her husband, Garry, take off in their little campervan, traveling as far as the Anti-Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lisa on August 24, 2014

In this age when US corporations have been granted legal personage without the bother of liability or social responsibility, I see A Calculated Life as a rendition of corporate utopia. At its core, corporate employees are in the process of being replaced with leased workers who have been constructed......more

Goodreads review by Trike on January 09, 2015

This is a very studied book. As the saying goes, the British lead lives of quiet desperation, and A Calculated Life personifies that. This is a future settled somewhere between the cartoonish over-the-topness of 1984 and the extreme exaggeration-to-make-a-point of Brave New World, and it is probably......more

Goodreads review by fromcouchtomoon on January 24, 2016

Brings to mind Asimov's Caves of Steel (Robot series), if Daneel Olivaw were ever self-aware enough to recognize his status for what it is-- a piece of property-- a dystopia beneath the surface of Asimovian utopia. Like Charnock's more recent Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, this novel includes......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 25, 2018

I’m never quite sure why some books get nominated for awards, and I say that in a curious rather than a negative way. ‘A Calculated Life’ deals with the potentially fascinating area of what it means to be human, and is actually a fairly interesting read, but it doesn’t really follow through on its e......more

Quotes

“For readers who want a smart, subtle exploration of human emotion and intelligence, this is an excellent choice. Charnock’s dystopia is actually believable. It’s very like our own world, but slightly stretched at the edges—corporate interests reign unchecked, the class structure is rigid, and technology has taken us well beyond the limitations of our synapses and gray matter. Charnock is a subtle worldbuilder, but a convincing one.” —Strange Horizons“Charnock has fascinating, complex things to say about work, sex, family and hope (and that pretty much covers it, don’t you think?).” —Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass, BSFA Award best novel winner“A strong debut. Recommended.” —Violin in a Void“Gets the grey matter firing.” —The Taichung Bookworm“Stunningly relevant re-imagining of 21st century Britain as a bioengineered corporate dystopia.” —Chris Graham

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