Walkaway: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Kirkus' Best Fiction of 2017
From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.
"Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle." —William Gibson
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 amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich 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 ultra-rich 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 multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of novels For the Win and the bestselling Little Brother among many others. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.
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Reviews for Walkaway
207 ratings21 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A terrific read - the storytelling, and the notions of how ideas are passed and tried on for size as people and societies change, age and grow combine for a one of a kind piece of speculative fiction.
I appreciated that the setting was not post apocalyptic that our characters by virtue of being walkaways were not castaways or survivors.
I appreciated that aging and gender were treated with focus in the story and enjoyed the fluidity with which the story tarried over them and the characters' relation to one another was driven by them but not relentlessly .
This is a book that even though a bit heavy-handedly at times will let the reader try on some social change ideas for size while at the same time providing a character driven adventure that does what all good reads do - tempt the reader with what might happen on the next page . - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Certainly the best Doctorow novel I've read; his tendency to write in long political lectures where you can't tell which character is speaking is damped down a bit here. Lots of mind-blowing future tech as well as action, thrills, cliff-hangers etc.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Best book of 2017 (so far). Pissed me off, broke my heart, and made me so, so hopeful.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is very preachy so it’s not really literature, but it preaches economics I like. Mix in some weird science fiction and it’s a long, mainly interesting read. Not only does Doctorow believe in moral economics but he is also quite the feminist. I’ve become a fan.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this not-to-distant future world, a Walkaway is someone who's had it with modern life and just walks away. This is a post-scarcity world, where 3D printers and 'fabbers' can make just about anything with the right raw materials. Outside the big cities, the walkaways gather and form their own communities, building a new society based on pure democracy, socialism and being about to make anything they need.The story follows three new walkaways, Etcetera (don't ask), Seth and Natalie. Etc and Seth are your basic everymen while Natalie is the daughter of a rich man (one of the zotta rich). Natalie's father will do almost anything (and he does a lot of bad things) to get her back.The book has a lot of interesting discussions of what it means to live in a post-scarcity world and the vast differences between the zottas and everyone else. Punctuating these discussions are scenes of destruction and terror as 'default' society (at least sometimes in the hire of Natalie's father) attack and attempt to scatter the walkaways. The walkaways are surprisingly resilient, utilizing high tech gizmos (drones, fabbers, mechas, and computer power that seems to be built into their bodies) to regroup and start again.The walkaway philosophy is worldwide and the default reaction is just as far reaching. But the realities of post-scarcity mean that the zottas can't keep controlling the future completely. The last few chapters stretch the story into the future when the main characters are old. It seems to be a happy ending.Grafted into this story is a plot about the attempts up upload human conscience into computer hardware. This added a lot of more discussion about what it means to be human.The book was a hard read. The characters talk and talk and talk. But most of the discussions are interesting, and eventually move the plot forward. I liked it but not enough to give it 5 stars. Some of the discussions were hard to follow (sometimes it was hard to figure out who was even speaking).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A better future after a hard fight - rough patches and jumps and a somewhat inexplicable leaving alone of Iceweasel after she gets away.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I got about a third of the way through this before I stopped reading. I honestly wanted to like this. I attended the LA Book Festival and listened to Cory speak about this book, and it sounded like something I would be interested in. Not so much it turns out. The first 25% builds a world I couldn’t sympathize with, and it uses its relatively few main characters to debate that worlds merits. This simply wasn’t my cup of tea.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5extremely interesting scenario wise (how do communities function under conditions of near abundance). his writing style is sometimes a bit toucgh to get to (lots of description embedded in dialogues of slightly dogmatic caracters) and as a result i struggled a bit with the middle part.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the 'default' world, rich oligarchs control everything. People are in debt and can only hope for a series of temporary jobs and neverending poverty. They begin to walkaway to deserted areas to build a new civilization and a better world. This can't happen without the rich and powerful trying everything to destroy them and their ideals.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5So, I did enjoy this. It gave me a lot of concepts and ideas to chew on and think about. I stopped a few times to see if I agreed with what was said, sometimes wanted to push back against it. It's a black future that it paints, but in the end hopeful, which was nice. I'm kind of tired of cynical looks at humanity. But this book is a LOT of dialogue. It reads like a drunken or stoned conversation about the drawbacks and merits of an anarcho-communistic society. That's not necessarily a bad thing in my view, but you should understand what you are getting into with this book.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I got about a quarter of the way into this and couldn't finish it. It is very preachy, and the preachy conversations between characters are very contrived. There are long stretches where very little happens, and then long stretches where you're wondering why we need to spend so much time dwelling on people getting in and out of bathtubs together, and then do we really need yet another description of how large Gilda's breasts are? If you have ever read any of Cory Doctorow's non-fiction, you're familiar with a lot of the stuff this book preaches about. He should stick to non-fiction.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great premise, interesting story lines - occasionally tooooo much exposition coming out of character's mouths. Fast read!
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I liked the ideas and world of this book, but the story was a slog for me. I don't know if it is just a mismatch between my expectations and the writing style, or something more significant. The characters were thinly drawn and universally smug in a way that I couldn't bring myself to like in any of them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some good bits, but long and rambling.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5science fiction--social science, technology, ethics, psychology and anarchy converge. Plus more.
I like Cory Doctorow but this was a bit too sci-fi for me, and the plot was wandering all over the map (on and off the grid, except that even off the grid you still had grid). I got to page 132, maybe will pick up again when there isn't a big waitlist. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I liked this a lot. It’s a very dystopian utopia depicted here, but very plausible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Future history reminding me of Heinlein; scientific, ethical and political debate; the question of what makes us human and what makes us us; all are set against a background of ecological disaster in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway. It’s a big sprawling (Heinlein-style) futuristic epic of great ideas, complex resolutions, human ingenuity, politics, greed vs generosity and more...The self-absorbed teens of the story’s beginning grow and change through politics and disaster, learn and lead through pain and expectation, and start and start again, drawing readers to ponder curious questions and imagine hope in a convincing but hopeless future.Walkaway is a dark haunting book, but also an oddly inspiring promise built from a weird and possibly believable premise. With so many ideas in one volume, it’s the sort of book you have to read from start to finish. And if it loses you in places, be sure it will startle and find you again in others. Long, slow and absorbing.Disclosure: I got it on a deal and I offer my honest review.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Utter drudgery. Threw it aside. Got tired of being hit about the head and shoulders with dicks, pricks, and politics.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Near future politico-sci-fi with lots of interesting ideas/new concepts covering teh 'fight' between zillionaires and the rest of the world/revolutionaries. A few jumps across 5/10 years are a bit jarring, but overall an interesting read. Even if it leaves some important plot questions unanswered, it does cover some very important points about our potential future.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's been a long time since I've read a book in this particular SF micro-genre, and I really enjoyed this one.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Set in North America only a couple generations from our own, technology has gotten better, but society has not. The disparity in wealth and income is more pronounced than ever. Social services are sparse. The wealthy no longer even pretend to rule in anyone's interests but their own. But when the makers walk away from the takers and set up sharing communities in which money no longer has value, the plutocrats take exception.
The setting didn't quite gel for me. It's obviously an extrapolation from our present society (as all good soft science fiction is), but I was never clear as to how we got there from here or what society overall had become. The characters were presented just well enough to imply their motivations, but they seemed to lack a certain depth. I didn't really connect with any of them.
As much a discourse on economics as a work of speculative fiction, Walkaway is a fascinating read, but I can't say I find the scenario plausible. I can see people getting fed up and rejecting the status quo. I can see them walking away to establish sharing communities. But I doubt the plutocrats would go after them as aggressively as they do in this story. It would be too expensive. The costs would be difficult to justify in their next quarterly reports.
As a work of 'serious' science fiction - which I'll define as one that addresses a serious contemporary issue - this is pretty good. It's well worth reading. As an absorbing tale that arouses a reader's empathy and curiosity—not so much.
P.S. Plus one star for the Terry Pratchett reference on page 323. Yeah, I know, that's hardly an objective criteria for a book review, but reviews aren't objective. They are entirely a matter of opinion. This one is mine, so I can do what I want.