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TOP 1000 REVIEWERon May 24, 2017
Cory Doctorow has a brilliant and insightful view of the future. His new novel Walkaway echos some of the themes from his prior novels--maker culture, wide-spread net technology and accompanying surveillance, growing disparities between cultural strata--while creating a future history that might be believable.
In this near-future North America, many people have chosen to become walkaways, turning their backs on default society, living in open and deserted land, creating communal living communities. It's a culture of abundance, where needs can be met by manufacturing plants and 3D printers fed by scavenged raw materials. The economy of the walkaways relies on gifts, plenty, and voluntary participation.
Doctorow makes some interesting economic and philosophical points about capitalism, meritocracy, and society. When the daughter of a very wealthy family decides to walkaway and embraces the walkaway culture, the flip sides of society come into contact and inevitable conflict. Their family squabble becomes emblematic of and central to a larger global conflict.
With Doctorow's style and thoughtfulness, there was enough in Walkaway to keep me interested and reading. But overall, I didn't love the story. The motives and actions of the big war against the walkaways were not compelling to me. The manufacturing tech was contrived. The explicit sex scenes were gratuitous and did not add to the story. The homosexual coupling and transgenderism seemed out of place, a blatant attempt to push a cultural agenda.
Walkaway is not Doctorow's worst book, but, unlike some of his other fiction, it's not one I think I'd like to read again.
In this near-future North America, many people have chosen to become walkaways, turning their backs on default society, living in open and deserted land, creating communal living communities. It's a culture of abundance, where needs can be met by manufacturing plants and 3D printers fed by scavenged raw materials. The economy of the walkaways relies on gifts, plenty, and voluntary participation.
Doctorow makes some interesting economic and philosophical points about capitalism, meritocracy, and society. When the daughter of a very wealthy family decides to walkaway and embraces the walkaway culture, the flip sides of society come into contact and inevitable conflict. Their family squabble becomes emblematic of and central to a larger global conflict.
With Doctorow's style and thoughtfulness, there was enough in Walkaway to keep me interested and reading. But overall, I didn't love the story. The motives and actions of the big war against the walkaways were not compelling to me. The manufacturing tech was contrived. The explicit sex scenes were gratuitous and did not add to the story. The homosexual coupling and transgenderism seemed out of place, a blatant attempt to push a cultural agenda.
Walkaway is not Doctorow's worst book, but, unlike some of his other fiction, it's not one I think I'd like to read again.
on May 23, 2017
Bloody good! Should be required reading for undergraduates & anyone wanting to stand for election. A real cure for Trump-depression.
on May 22, 2017
Current Doctorow seems to have an argument with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Doctorow, and actually puts all the arguments of the meritocracy he proposed in DOMK in the mouth of a guy who has a good heart but is kind of an jerk. For those of you who read and/or remember DOMK it's about the people who keep Disney World running because they love Disney World. More specifically there's an elaborate points system where people give each other points for doing cool things, and people with more points have more say in what to do next. This all sounded cool back in 2003 (when DOMK was published), before we had likes, social media, and gamification, and we realized it was a skinner box trap that would lead to the horrible dystopia of Black Mirror's "Nosedive" instead of Doctorow's meritocracy. Doctorow now seems to agree.
In Walkaway he tries to say that we live in an embarrassment of riches and that the 0.01% fool us into believing we need jobs and money to get stuff when if we just walk away and make things that are cool because they are cool, then we'll all have enough to eat, a place to live, and fulfilling activities to occupy our lives. Once you build something cool, someone is bound to want it, so you just walk away again and build something else. 3D printers are ubiquitous, as are plans for things to make because of the net (handwave). Of course, the 0.01% don't like people walking away, and paint them as terrorists, criminals, and all around bad people. Lots of walk away people die, but the others just keep walking away into harsher environments like a terribly contaminated asbestos and chemical spill site where the walkaways are printing their own space suits and practicing (kind of) to become Martians.
Oh, and the big breakthrough is that the walkaways discover how to record consciousness, effectively making people immortal as long as you have the server capacity and storage to run them. This pisses off the 0.01% to no end, because if that technology is available to everyone then they can't become immortal oligarchs ruling mankind forever.
Huge grains of salt are needed here, because Doctorow's people seem to be perfect communists, and I'm pretty sure those don't exist. Doctorow has substituted "people will do it because of points" with "people will do it because they'll see it's the right thing to do."
For all that he's writing about near-future dystopias, he's really an optimist.
In Walkaway he tries to say that we live in an embarrassment of riches and that the 0.01% fool us into believing we need jobs and money to get stuff when if we just walk away and make things that are cool because they are cool, then we'll all have enough to eat, a place to live, and fulfilling activities to occupy our lives. Once you build something cool, someone is bound to want it, so you just walk away again and build something else. 3D printers are ubiquitous, as are plans for things to make because of the net (handwave). Of course, the 0.01% don't like people walking away, and paint them as terrorists, criminals, and all around bad people. Lots of walk away people die, but the others just keep walking away into harsher environments like a terribly contaminated asbestos and chemical spill site where the walkaways are printing their own space suits and practicing (kind of) to become Martians.
Oh, and the big breakthrough is that the walkaways discover how to record consciousness, effectively making people immortal as long as you have the server capacity and storage to run them. This pisses off the 0.01% to no end, because if that technology is available to everyone then they can't become immortal oligarchs ruling mankind forever.
Huge grains of salt are needed here, because Doctorow's people seem to be perfect communists, and I'm pretty sure those don't exist. Doctorow has substituted "people will do it because of points" with "people will do it because they'll see it's the right thing to do."
For all that he's writing about near-future dystopias, he's really an optimist.
on May 21, 2017
I have been waiting for this, it did not disappoint. Let's all hope that the future is somewhere near where this puts us.
on May 20, 2017
Walkaway grabbed me from the first page, and I finished it in one long evening. Doctorow creates a very plausible near future, and fills it with a variety of fully developed characters. Exploring the consequences of current trends is one pleasure of the book; another is watching people with different philosophies genuinely debate how to improve a bad situation. With new social structures, and advancing science, this is a book that fills the underserved literature-of-ideas corner of science fiction.
on May 16, 2017
Forget cyberpunk and steampunk, Doctorow creates a new genre, dev-opsecpunk, spinning up a world where people fed up with the scarcity power play literally walkaway to create an abundant world from the leftovers, unwanted and over-resourced. Technology to manufacture nearly anything creates the latitude for such a leap and if the Default world could stand it, things just might work out. Inside is the story of pioneers inventing the "first days of a better nation"—rich characters—who capture your inner dissatisfaction, pull you into their world and make you believe in the human spirit. Walkaway doesn't feel like a distant future, but a struggle we are perhaps engaged in already, offering a prescient road map to modern utopia, or perhaps more pragmatically, a hopeful dystopia.
on May 14, 2017
As usual, an original story to make you think/hope/worry/dream. It's very plausible but scary as hell like any good near future story. I couldn't put it down.
on May 14, 2017
Walkaway embiggens the smallest reader. It looks at our future, with the same sort of hopefulness as Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek.
Also, get the audiobook, the narration makes it totally worth it.
Also, get the audiobook, the narration makes it totally worth it.
