Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

Ebook, 2017

Description

Cory Doctorow's first adult novel in eight years is an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death. Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza?known to his friends as Hubert, Etc?was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be?except among the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. Falling in with Natalie, an ultrarich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society?and walk away. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life?food, clothing, shelter?from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It's still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators, animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultrarich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it's war, a war that will turn the world upside down. Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multigenerational SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years-and the very human people who will live their consequences.… (more)

Media reviews

Sydney Morning Herald

Many will have arguments with the assumptions built into these questions, or find fault with their Panglossian tendency to defer hard questions about the limits of growth or the provision of basic services to those unable to provide for themselves. Yet at a point in history when, to borrow the late

Mark Fisher's memorable phrase, "capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable", it's exciting to hear them asked at all, and even more enlivening to encounter a writer prepared to look forward and imagine not the end of the world, but something that bears a passing resemblance to utopia.

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NPR

It's the story of a utopia in progress, as messy as every new thing ever is, told in the form of people talking to each other, arguing with each other and working together to solve problems. It's all about the deep, disturbing, recognizable weirdness of the future that must come from the present we

have already made for ourselves, trying to figure out what went wrong and what comes next.

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Kirkus Reivews

A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don’t already.

Booklist

The sweeping epic, which covers decades of Walkaway life—despite some difficult-to-read but entirely believable character trauma—is ultimately suffused with hope.

Locus

Walkaway is what science fiction can look like under modern cultural conditions. It’s ‘‘relevant,’’ it’s full of tremulous urgency, it’s Occupy gone exponential. It’s a novel of polarized culture-war in which all the combatants fast-talk past each other while occasionally getting

slaughtered by drones. It makes Ed Snowden look like the first robin in spring. As a novel, it’s got all kinds of basic plot and structural problems, but I refuse to complain about that, because so what? Walkaway is a sprawling, ominous and important work of a kind one rarely sees... I won’t say there’s nothing else like Walkaway, because there have been some other books like it, but most of them started mass movements or attracted strange cults. There seems to be a whole lot of that activity going on nowadays. After this book, there’s gonna be more.

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