Scan barcode
A review by trike
A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock
4.0
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 [b:1984|5470|1984|George Orwell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348990566s/5470.jpg|153313] and the extreme exaggeration-to-make-a-point of [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865608s/5129.jpg|3204877], and it is probably all the more frightening for that.
There's no real drama here. No histrionics, no action sequences, no fight scenes: this is just a future that's approaching where our humanity and freedoms are stripped away one by one until we look around one day and they're no longer there.
Normal humans are shunted to ghettos, while bionically-enhanced humans rise to middle management and cloned enhanced humans fill the roles of data analyst and accountant. It's a stratified, class-based society taken to its logical conclusion. Not the one imagined by Wells in [b:The Time Machine|2493|The Time Machine|H.G. Wells|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327942880s/2493.jpg|3234863], but one that's feeling a little too plausible these days as the super-rich convince ordinary people to vote away their rights. The rich engineered this world, the upper middle class don't want to rock the boat, the poor can't do anything about it and the slaves have no rights at all.
It's a quiet book, and that's why it's scary. We don't fight it; our freedom ends with a whimper, not a bang.
This is a future settled somewhere between the cartoonish over-the-topness of [b:1984|5470|1984|George Orwell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348990566s/5470.jpg|153313] and the extreme exaggeration-to-make-a-point of [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865608s/5129.jpg|3204877], and it is probably all the more frightening for that.
There's no real drama here. No histrionics, no action sequences, no fight scenes: this is just a future that's approaching where our humanity and freedoms are stripped away one by one until we look around one day and they're no longer there.
Normal humans are shunted to ghettos, while bionically-enhanced humans rise to middle management and cloned enhanced humans fill the roles of data analyst and accountant. It's a stratified, class-based society taken to its logical conclusion. Not the one imagined by Wells in [b:The Time Machine|2493|The Time Machine|H.G. Wells|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327942880s/2493.jpg|3234863], but one that's feeling a little too plausible these days as the super-rich convince ordinary people to vote away their rights. The rich engineered this world, the upper middle class don't want to rock the boat, the poor can't do anything about it and the slaves have no rights at all.
It's a quiet book, and that's why it's scary. We don't fight it; our freedom ends with a whimper, not a bang.