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    A Calculated Life
    A Calculated Life
    A Calculated Life
    Audiobook6 hours

    A Calculated Life

    Written by Anne Charnock

    Narrated by Susan Duerden

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel) Award

    Late 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?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 10, 2013
    ISBN9781480572690
    A Calculated Life
    Author

    Anne Charnock

    Anne Charnock is the author of Dreams Before the Start of Time, winner of the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her debut novel, A Calculated Life, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award. The Guardian featured Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind in “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2015.” Anne’s novella, The Enclave, won the 2017 British Science Fiction Association Award for Short Fiction. Her writing career began in journalism, and her articles appeared in the Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. Learn more at www.annecharnock.com.

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    Reviews for A Calculated Life

    3.5/5

    77 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      ??That?s the heart of the problem. I haven?t lived enough. My character is just the combination of my intellect and my faults. I haven?t had time to become more complex, more interesting. [?] I?m not sure if you realize this but without my flaws I?d be pretty dull. You should know that.??In ?A Calculated Life? by Anne CharnockFor the sake of argument let me be devil?s advocate.The scientific materialist assumption is that the body is the primary organ and consciousness is secondary. This is not so; consciousness is the primary experience and the body and all other experiences are secondary. The body is a construct of consciousness. Forward thinking scientists are just beginning to realise this. Man might be able to prolong life but a 'machine' existence will never happen because the 'reality' of phenomenal existence is simultaneously 'real' and 'not real'. People, including scientists tend to see everything in terms of being a binary system. Yes/no, off/on, is/isn't, 0/1, true /untrue. Reality is not that simplistic. Mm, that's some good pseudo bullshit. Preventing aging is almost certainly more achievable soon than consciousness transfer, but ultimately the latter offers greater security and opportunity. Immortal DNA is all very well, until you suffer catastrophic injury or brain damage. With transferable consciousness, you get the immortality, along with the option to backup and restore in the event of a fatal accident, as well as the ability to travel at light-speed as a digital signal to be reawakened on arrival. And that's before we even get into the idea of truly inhabiting the virtual world as digital consciousness. With an infinitesimal fraction of the earth's current energy use, you could have untold trillions living in a virtual utopia, with a near infinite diversity of cultures, worlds and lifestyles. Nevertheless, is it misleading to talk about 'transferable' consciousness? What would be uploaded would be a facsimile of your consciousness. As far as the exterior world, interacting with the facsimile, would be concerned it would be you. However, it would actually be a totally new instance of you, with no continuity of your original consciousness. It's what's always troubled me about the idea of Star Trek-type teleportation - the thought that disintegrating someone in one place and then reassembling them in another, would effectively mean the death of the original, internally-experienced consciousness (although nobody else would notice or care!). Of course, it all depends on the manner of the transfer, and your outlook on identity and consciousness. Personally, I would consider an accurate facsimile to be me. A second version, sure, but I don't see that as an obstacle to identity. Once they start experiencing separate things though, they will diverge, and the concept of which is the "true" me becomes less meaningful. The continuity of consciousness is interesting, as you point out; a new instance would be me, but would leave the original me intact, so from the original's POV, the copy is a clone. However, if you could first augment the brain with computers, allowing consciousness to run on both subtracts at the same time (imagine your normal consciousness, but with access to extra digital memory, for example) then you could theoretically effect the transfer smoothly, "moving" your consciousness purely into the inorganic memory. Basically, this kind of stuff will force us to challenge our ideas of self, and of identity, because we've never had cause to think of ourselves as anything other than singular beings, though observations after the severing of the corpus callosum in epilepsy sufferers has already put strain on that idea, suggesting that we are already less easily defined than we like to think (I recommend Greg Egan's SF books as a great place to explore these ideas, beginning with Permutation City).The joy of intelligent thinking. We have it. Computers don't. Computers will be able to make decisions (and sometimes those decisions are going to be wrong), but there are so many ways in which computers cannot compete with the human. "I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do". (HAL 2001). Just look at the European Language top level C2 - "Can express themselves spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations." Being able to say things with "shades of meaning", heck native speakers cannot even do that sometimes. And when it comes to listening or reading humans can read between the lines and they can understand subtleties and nuances. Computers and robots will enhance the world - hey, they can even go to visit Mars rather than risking the life of a person - but it will take much more time before they can out think us.Chess - Go - Tic-Tac-Toe these are games! And they have finite boundaries. Real life? Enjoy it.Charnock plays with these concepts in a manner that felt non-gimmicky. Lots of SF nowadays feels all too gimmicky and swamped in crap. Charnock?s basic presumption is that the mind is ultimately not just software, running on the hardware of the brain. Thus, we can transfer it, duplicate it, upload it and the rest. Throughout the novel we?re kept in doubt as to the nature of the human mind. Real science has made very little headway in that direction. Some scientists and philosophers deny there is such a thing as the mind at all. They say the mind is just what the brain does. Jayna?s rebooting makes me thing: "It won't be her surely", but this doesn't even quite catch it, it's worse than that. It won't even be a copy of her. No Jayna 2. Whatever Charnock created on another piece of hardware and software - even if the constructors used another biological neural network! - will approximate aspects that we as the readers will be able to identify, but a) Jayna will never be the same, and b) point (a) does not even matter, because it won't be identical. Even if some godly creature made an atom-for-atom copy of Jayna, that's going to be another ?person?. Doesn't matter that it's a copy, meaning same memories etc. From the point of creation of the copy there are two different and separate physical beings without any connection. Will there be a sequel to this wonderful novel? For the first time in many years I wouldn?t mind reading it now. NB: At the end of the novel Charnock mentions Kurzweil?s ?The Age of Spiritual Machines? which I read a long time ago. One word: crap! Kurzweil never gives indication of understanding that a finite but infinitely varied and magnificent environment exists in the real world, beyond humans, nor what its relationship would be to this kind of bizarre transformation. The perpetrators of this nightmare seem to be unaware that we are in the Sixth Great Extinction now and that it will include humans. One must believe these people have been in their cells with computers and chips for too long. Perhaps their whole lives. What will happen when the EMP attack takes it all down? I live in Lisbon that is so far away from this kind of isolated industrial society conceit that I can hardly believe Kurzweil understands the real world. But I tell you, in my real world, my swallows were back 2 months early?That much I know.SF = Speculative Fiction.
    • 3/5
      This is an interesting book that examines the concept of people who are genetically modified to perform certain functions very effectively. I found the story was a little too antiseptic. It was difficult to develop any sympathy for the characters.
    • 3/5
      The protagonist is a construct, physically indistinguishable from a human but grown without a childhood and with data analysis skills implanted that make her better at finding patterns than ordinary humans; she reads as non-neurotypical. But something seems to be going wrong with her programming, as unexpected thoughts and desires impinge on her. Corporate dystopia with a focus on the nature of personhood.
    • 4/5
      This was Charnock’s debut novel, but I’ve jumped about a bit in reading her books, having read her latest most recently. However, she doesn’t stray from her shtick, so I’d a good idea what to expect. A Calculated Life provides the setting of Charnock’s novella, The Enclave, which is good, but suffers from not knowing the setting, as revealed in A Calculated Life. A flaw I have now rectified. In the near-future of A Calculated Life, which seems to be set after some sort of climate crash as Lancashire now has a Mediterranean climate, “simulated humans” are relatively common in the workplace. They’re force-grown, and genetically-engineered for certain traits. The main character of A Calculated Life is Jayna, one such simulated human. She works for a private company in Manchester, predicting economic and social trends based on seemingly unconnected events. She is very good at it – much better than “bios” and earlier models of simulants. But driving her ability is an obsession to learn as much as possible about people… and so she begins to secretly break out of her carefully prescribed life. This involves several trips to an enclave, as sort of working class suburb of Manchester which the government has pretty much abandoned – a sort of a cross between a ghetto and a barrio. Charnock paints a convincing portrait of a late-twenty-first century Britain which has responded to a drop in population due to climate change (rather than due to Brexit, although climate change will inevitably follow). The world-building is very low-key – and if only more sf writers did it so – to the extent it takes a while to figure out what is what. There’s enough that is the same, and enough that’s very different, to keep the reader comfortable as they slowly learn what’s what. The writing is good, clear and neither showy nor flashy, but this is not a long novel, only 208 pages. It does make it feel a little insubstantial. It’s good, but, happily, each new book by Charnock is better than the last. Her most recent, Dreams Before the Start of Time, will be getting the #1 slot on my ballot at the BSFA Awards (I’m especially happy it made the shortlist). Charnock is proving to be a name to watch, although I think she has something much more substantial than what she was written so far yet to deliver. If you’ve not read her yet, why not?
    • 2/5
      GMO arguments. They're tired and they're boring. Where I think the argument gets interesting is when you start to follow the slippery slope down. We've already made significant genetic modifications (through cross-breeding) to our domestic animals. What if we decided to start tinkering with people? It might start out with someone totally benign, like neutralizing the BRCA genes and sparing thousands of women the agonizing choice between their reproductive organs and almost certain cancer. Eradicating Tay-Sachs, Parkinson's. But what about other genetically-related syndromes? What about dwarfism? Down Syndrome? Some forms of deafness that are genetically linked? We start staring down an uncomfortably eugenicist barrel.A future like this is where we find ourselves in Anne Charnock's A Calculated Life. It's the future and there are three kinds of people: organics (totally normal people except with genetic altering to prevent most diseases and addictions), bionics (given an implant that dramatically increases mental performance), and simulants (humans "born" as adults with incredibly powerful cognitive capacity, basically robots in human bodies). Simulants, like our main character Jayna, live in communal compounds and are leased to their employers for large sums of money, collecting only a small allowance of their own. Jayna and her friends are a second generation of simulant designed to be more "lifelike" than the first, who had no real personalities. Amid worrying reports that the simulants are starting to act, well, more like people, Jayna finds herself convinced that learning more about non-simulants in their natural environment will help her be better at her job (predictive trend analysis) and starts to reach out beyond the borders of the world she's always known.It's pretty easy to see where the story is going when it starts to go out of its way to bring up Jayna's interesting, good-hearted organic coworker Dave. Obviously, they're going to fall for each other and Consequences Will Ensue. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not at all put off by spoilers, because I feel like they shed light on lazy writing (if all your story has is the twist, it doesn't have anything), so having a good idea of how the plot would turn out wasn't the problem. The problem is that it didn't get there in any sort of interesting or exciting way. Jayna and Dave are never more than thin sketches of characters and their world doesn't have much richness or detail. It feels like a mishmash of 1984 and Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? except without the incisive social insight of either. It's not egregiously bad, just aggressively mediocre.
    • 5/5
      This is a slow starting but ultimately moving “wow!” of a story, set in a dystopian future London with three types of “humans”: humans with a moderate amount of genetic engineering to help them resist social evils like addiction, genetically engineered humans who have been enhanced with implants to make them smarter, and simulants or “created” humans who have been completely bio-engineered to have beyond genius level brains that can process huge amounts of data for their employers. Simulants, of course, have never been children and they have no families, so they live in regulated dorm-like residences. There has been some tinkering with the simulant models to make them more personable, but giving them a larger emotional scope could backfire by decreasing their functionality, so they are carefully monitored for any deviations.Jayna, one of these newer simulants, uses her stellar data crunching skills to forecast social and economic trends at the offices of Mayhew and McCline where she tries to interact smoothly with both types of more normal humans.These humans interest her greatly in spite, or maybe because, of the fact that she often has to correct their faulty work, and the slow start I mentioned is no criticism because it’s fascinating to be inside her head as she interprets the world around her.Jayna starts to believe that both her personal life and work-related predictive skills would be enhanced by experiencing more variety and texture, which draws her slowly into an increasingly dangerous relationship with Dave, an un-implant-enhanced human who works in the company archives but has a side business selling honey. Dave’s grandfather had been a rebellious, freethinking college professor, placing Dave very low in the social hierarchy, so he lives in the high-rise, slum-like outskirts of town, past the comfortable upper middle class houses of humans with implants, and beyond the citrus groves that must be part of the English landscape as a result of climate change. As new understandings and sensations open to Jayna--some as simple as the smell of a fresh brewed cup of coffee--she feels compelled to continue her risky encounters with Dave, but if she’s caught she could be wiped clean and reprogrammed by “the constructor”, the entity who supplies the simulant workers to businesses. The author creates a strong connection between hyper-intelligent but naive Jayna and the reader--though anxious about the possible consequences of Jayna’s actions I was cheering her on--and the world building of this chilling, socially stratified future London is excellent, and introduced naturally through Jayna’s interactions with the people who work at her office and the simulants who share her housing compound. The building tension of the story kept me hooked, and the ending left me a lot to think about. I listened to the well done audio version of this unusual but compelling book.
    • 1/5
      I had such high hopes for this one... The story sounded interesting, and I'll admit, it didn't hurt that the cover is gorgeous. In the end, though, I was glad that I had finally finished it. And I skipped a bit towards the end. I just couldn't take the utterly boring contemplations of Jayna anymore. The whole problem was that I couldn't get any connection with her. Fine, so she is pretty much a human computer, so she wouldn't be very human to begin with, but Anne Charnock is not the first to write about strange humans, logical, computer-like ones. And I had no problem relating to those. Breq (Ancillary justice) is an AI. Had no problem there. Seem goes for the AI in WWW:Wake Jayna however, she bored me to death. Even when she starts to develop a will of her own, she goes about it very strangely, jumping into the sack with one of the first guys she meets. But hey, it's all about her sense of smell waking up her emotions, so who cares about actually developing a relationship? On her side and on his. It felt out-of-place. Within a few weeks she is sleeping with the archive guy and is embezzling money. Surely all of that could have been interesting, you'd think? Unfortunately, no. By the end, I was sort of hoping things would end up badly, and I was actually sorry that Jayna didn't manage to jump in front of that bus. That would have been a more satisfying ending...
    • 4/5
      I received this in a giveaway contest from the publisher.

      This novel had an interesting idea an the central plot point and it certainly raised some interesting questions along the way. The story is of the late 21st century dystopia set in England where life is heavily regulated by the government and corporations. The main character is a simulant (clone?) who forecasts different trends using mathemetical models. The story is centered around her daily life and how she starts questioning her place, the people around her and what it means to be human. GOOD STORY BUT IT HAS A TERRIBLE ENDING

      I can recommend this for a good story.
      3.5 stars
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this and must say that I've not read so quiet a book in some time. The writing was well done and I found that I would put it down and come back to it but Jayna was always lingering in the back of my mind. Witnessing her becoming self-aware and striving to understand her humanity was fascinating. In a world where she could be carted off & dispatched for saving her allotment to order Chicken Biryani for dinner, I figured the more she tested boundaries trying to gain more understanding of people, their likes, dislikes and lives, things wouldn't end so well for her. And they don't but the journey was worth it and I'm glad that I took it with her. This story had two epilogues and the second was by far, my favorite. Hannah seems to have picked up the torch Jayna's left behind and after the story ended, I was left wondering what Constructor Holdings is going to do with all these models now that they're becoming more self-aware more often. This neatly ordered society is well on its way to some calculated chaos. If there were a second book I'd read it but I'm quite fine musing over this one for a while. I'd recommend this if you're looking for a speculative sci-fi that's also a quick read.I received a copy of this from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
    • 4/5
      A Calculated Life is set in the near future, a future where super intelligent people are bred to order and then leased to top businesses. They don't really get their own lives and are segregated from the rest of the population. The story tells of one of these people and their journey of discovery of human nature.

      I enjoyed reading this book a lot, the writing style is crisp and suits the story well. The course it takes is a little predictable, but that isn't a problem, it's the journey that makes this book worth reading.

      The story is well paced and leads to a satisfying conclusion. I'll look forward to reading more of this author's work.