The Equation is a future dystopian story written by Ivan Carl. The protagonist is Nathan Brooks, a graduate student whose beloved professor, Adrian Holt, was murdered. The timing of the book was at least a couple hundred years in the future, probably even further ahead. Governments were no longer as we know them today. Rather, there are a group of people who make decisions that affect everyone on the planet. They believed that humans needed to be managed. It is their goal to keep everyone working harder and harder, not ever to attain contentment. It is their belief that those who were content were a threat to the society that they had created. It was Holt who developed an equation that represented that circumstance. The equation was C= H+W/T, or contentment equal health plus wealth divided by time. Holt was murdered by the conspirators known as The Continuum because they thought if Holt’s finding were published, it would lead to their undoing.
Holt left Nathan some obscure clues that he was able to follow. Then he was joined by Lucia who had worked on behalf of the Continuum for 12 years, either killing or discrediting various people who wanted to challenge the Continuum. When Nathan appeared on the scene, she had a change of heart. Lucia felt guilty about her skilled help to suppress whatever the Continuum wanted shut down. At the risk of her own life, she decided to become Nathan’s partner since she knew just how the Continuum would track him. Hiding from them was impossible. As Nathan and Lucia worked to find data that would support their views, it was Lucia who said of the Continuum, “They’re protecting their own relevance. Their own power. The system doesn’t fear chaos. It fears sufficiency. Because sufficient people don’t need to be managed.”
I actually tried to enjoy this book, but I could not reach an understanding of why contentment or sufficiency were such a danger. There were parts of the book that hit me as being redundant, but the conspiracy to control by keeping people in the dark about the value of their work simply did not seem so dire. On the one hand, Carl was also writing about the world we live in now in which I see people working 80 hours a week to just get ahead in life, but they never quite reach satisfying lives. Certainly there are people alive today who work so hard the lives they lead are actually very unfulfilling, but by the 50% mark of the book, I was simply uninterested in reading any more. While I was quite sorry to see that Holt had been killed and that Nathan’s life was also in danger, the story just never actually gripped me in a way that I expect from a god book. I doubt that my opinion will be universal – the book just wasn’t for me.
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