lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2018-09-09 08:18 pm
lightreads) wrote2018-09-09 08:18 pm
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A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock
A Calculated Life
3/5. Anne Charnock is one of the most intersting science fiction authors you've probably never heard of. This, her debut, is not as subtly brilliant and feminist as her Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, but it is her trademark slim, spare, oblique book. This time about a simulant, a person grown rather than born, for the purpose of her extraordinary analytical skills. And what she does when she and her cohort of simulants start to want more than their lives as leased property to corporations or governments.
This is a very polite dystopia. A shiny dystopia where violence and addiction have been almost entirely eliminated. It's about analysis, and black swans, and the connection of scent to memory, and class warfare, and – that old standby – what it means to be a person. It doesn't come together with the complexity of Sleeping Embers, but by God is every word in this book doing some work.
3/5. Anne Charnock is one of the most intersting science fiction authors you've probably never heard of. This, her debut, is not as subtly brilliant and feminist as her Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, but it is her trademark slim, spare, oblique book. This time about a simulant, a person grown rather than born, for the purpose of her extraordinary analytical skills. And what she does when she and her cohort of simulants start to want more than their lives as leased property to corporations or governments.
This is a very polite dystopia. A shiny dystopia where violence and addiction have been almost entirely eliminated. It's about analysis, and black swans, and the connection of scent to memory, and class warfare, and – that old standby – what it means to be a person. It doesn't come together with the complexity of Sleeping Embers, but by God is every word in this book doing some work.
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Enjoy. I almost didn't appreciate that book, it's so deceptively … delicate? Idk what the word is. But I sat up 3/4 of the way through and wnet oh, because it is actually doing a whole lot of things.
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And it's very useful to me to know that going in! I shall report back... in the usual months-to-years time span, alas.
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