A Calculated Life

by Anne Charnock

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Book cover for A Calculated Life

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Nominated for the 2013 Philip K. Dick 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?
  • ISBN10 1477849513
  • ISBN13 9781477849514
  • Publish Date 24 September 2013 (first published 11 February 2013)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Amazon Publishing
  • Imprint 47North
  • Format Paperback (US Trade)
  • Pages 208
  • Language English