Walkaway

Walkaway #1

by Cory Doctorow

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 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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Cyberpunk, Audiobook, Speculative Fiction, Solarpunk

384 pages, ebook

First published April 25, 2017

About the author

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture Of The Nerds and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

I admit I went in blind to this only know the title, the cover, and the fact that I've been a big fan of Cory Doctorow ever since Little Brother. I thought it was going to be something of a thriller with perhaps a political and especially an awesome technological bent to it.

I didn't expect it to be this huge! The ideas in this novel can easily be ranked up with the very biggest novels of the last century.

Let me explain: Walkaway as a term is nothing more than dropping out of the ranks of the norm, of going off to live simply, if not precisely without tech, then at least giving up on the whole rat race that is defined here as the "default". It's not hippies, although there are those, too. It's a collection of all the people that this world has no use for, the people that despair under debts they can't pay, lives that bring them no joy, of people who realize that they have always been slaves in everything but name.

These are the people who walked away from it all. It's in the future so we have an honest free beer with open source technologies, 3d printers much more advanced than what we have here that works with everything from clothing to medicines, and the open idealism that collides with regular assholes that you'll find in any human population.

Only, these communities are benefited with social modeling techniques, even newer tech that can scan and model human minds, and much more... in everyone's hands. These are people who gave up on wealth and status to live in all kinds of communes and social experiments, many of which fail but each improves upon the last until better and better open source societies are created, improved upon, and tested... and while this shouldn't have been a big deal to the rest of the world that was busy doing its old thing, the Walkaways stumbled upon success and success, outperforming and making the "Default" society jealous... and you know what jealous people do when they have guns and they want what the defenseless have.

I'm just barely scratching the surface here. There's a lot of great characters, a lot of really beautiful stories and situations and social experiments and theory on human consciousness. There's a lot of tragedy and hope, too, spread out over a great long span of time. A lifetime, you might say. But by the end, who's to say how long that is?

This is really creative and hard-hitting exploratory SF. This is the stuff that will stay in my consciousness long, long after hundreds of lighter SF have rolled through me. This is that kind of novel that can change or break a whole society if it takes off.

Now, I can't say that I absolutely agree with all the points that Doctorow makes, but his vision of the future and the erudition and thoughtful expression of all these fantastic ideas more than makes up for any complaints I may have. He's a believer in humanity. He believes in people.

There's something truly wonderful about that.

Hope.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. I hate not finishing books, but I just couldn't go on. 25% in and no story. Vague characters with no goals.

What you DO get is a speculative techno-utopia in which it's just assumed you can obtain the raw materials to manufacture arbitrarily complex technology such as 3D printers, "wet printers", lasers, ATVs and exoskeletal suits, and mountains of computers. Rare earth metals, anyone? Maybe if he'd just invoked nanotech, I might have been like, "OK, fine, whatever."

But the straw that broke the specfic's back was the sudden shift to a new-old character (who we still don't really know anything about) who is happily invited by a bunch of strangers into their hidden lair to go ahead and directly interact RIGHT AWAY with a fucking uploaded consciousness.

Look: these are all things I find extremely interesting, ok? I am *extremely* sympathetic to the anarchist-syndicalist outlook on mutual aid and so forth. But this book reads like it was tossed off in a half-asleep stupor and never refactored into anything resembling even a mediocre story.

But that's not even what really gets me: it's the overwhelming theme that technology will save us, and the overwhelming assumption that all this extremely sophisticated technology doesn't require prohibitive (read: impossible) amounts of time, energy and myriad other resources to actually build and keep running, no matter how much ADDITIONAL technology you throw in to help you do it.

But again, none of this specifically made me want to throw the book into the garbage. It was the out-of-left-field introduction of full-on brain-in-a-jar uploaded consciousness that made me say "Give me a fucking break" out loud. And it's *not* because I don't believe in the future potential of this idea: it's because I don't believe for a second that a bunch of walkaways scrounging technotrash (however assisted with autonomous drones and whatnot) could build the neuroimaging technology at the resolution required to even come close to doing what's required to upload a mind.

But Tedb0t, you plea, this cool shit is what sci-fi is all about, right? No. Sci-fi is about making you suspend your disbelief, making you believe. This book absolutely and utterly failed at that, and too many other critical factors, to the point that it's actually making me angry how shitty it was. Oh, and the fact that every single fucking character talked in exactly the same way, all transparent author-mouthpieces gushing the same sassy, over-the-top techno-jargon that makes you say OK I GET IT, CORY, YOU'RE A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER didn't help either. I mean, I got every single technology reference and I still hated it. I can't imagine what reading this would be like for someone who has never made a git commit. Boring, pointless garbage-hell?

Maybe the remaining 75% was blissfully amazing—I may never know. I strongly doubt it.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was 12 or 13, I stumbled upon anarcho-syndicalism of the Bookchin/Rocker variety and was convinced it was solely capable of saving the world. At age 16, I saw Kubrick's film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and found myself adamantly rooting for the omnipotent state, since it appeared to be morally superior to the violent autonomous gang member Alex. If Cory Doctorow's unique novel Walkaway serves no other purpose, it can be an antidote or foil of sorts for Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Sure, every variety of anarchism holds fatal flaws, but at the end of the day, the state truly is something that must be foiled at every turn - not through violence or alternative modalities of power, but through walking away. The Zen deflection of power is the toughest and most radical thing we can do, and Doctorow shows us methodically and carefully what this can mean for our post-scarcity futures.

The basic premise of the story is a near-future dystopia/utopia (reader's choice) in which human social and political relations have grown so toxic, millions of people decide to walk away, becoming voluntarily homeless and withdrawing from most social interactions. The walkaways do not stay in urban areas leaving "Will Work for Food" litter, but instead opt for new kinds of toxicity, homesteading in polluted lands that have been declared national sacrifice areas in a world succumbing to pollution and climate change. The ultra-rich need little people to justify their power concentration, but there is little left for the people to do, most jobs having been automated. Instead of being given a guaranteed annual income, the people are left in cities as detritus. Yet the rich have to treat the walkaways as though they were the ultimate terrorists, because they dare to reject the existing hierarchies of power.

Doctorow, founder of Boing Boing and a cyberpunk long before you ever heard the word, is an ideal vehicle to carry many practical messages of possible futures. The only thing saving this book from an automatic five-star rating is that the language does not always have that special grace of a Pynchon, Powers, Atwood, Gibson, or Hallberg. Occasionally, the dialogue needs to carry forward a goal of explaining important cultural or political truths in the new walkaway world, and as a result, characters sound a trifle too self-aware and verbose. But that hindrance is limited to dialogue alone. In descriptions of natural phenomena or sex of any variety, Doctorow excels in his use of language. At other times, the fast-paced narrative is closer to that of an adventure novel. In this instance, it is perfectly OK, because Doctorow gives us a complex and empathic adventure story without parallel. In developing new slang, however, Doctorow can get too hung up on slogans that seem silly, or that have already been appropriated by the right wing - "special snowflake," for example - if I never had read the words (and he uses the phrase often), the book might be a more enjoyable experience.

Walkaway bears some superficial resemblances to A Clockwork Orange in carrying a language and lexicon of its own. The ultra-rich 1% are "zottas," the organized world that passes for the real world is "default," and new processes of growing and creating food bear words we're not quire sure about, such as "feedstock" and "scop." Once the rhythm of this cyber-libertarian walkaway world has been established, the details of what terms may mean become less important. We flow in a walkaway world that long ago accepted the sexual, gender, racial and even species diversity that caused so much pain early in the 21st century, a world that has (at least in theory) adopted the Zapatista ideology of power - power is never to be sought or won in a revolution, it is to be deliberately dissipated and dissolved from the foreground. Obviously, there is still violence when the default world tries to attack the walkaway world, and occasionally there is violence within the walkaway world when individuals retain obsessions with power, or when they cannot adjust to a world that accepts no form of meritocracy whatsoever. And this is Doctorow's point - if you seriously desire to walkaway, you must relinquish any sense of how you can be recognized, any sense of ego.

Of course, the appeal of achieving a type of immortality through the preservation of brain-wave patterns is Doctorow's way of gracefully suggesting Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation strategies. It becomes impossible to tell which instantiation of Limpopo or Etcetera is "real," or indeed if a soul (or pattern of neural network activations) can be said to be more real in one body or another, or within a distributed set of compute platforms. Again, the story behind the science and behind the anarchist philosophy is that the ego must be relinquished before the apparent ego achieves immortality, or something resembling immortality in such a limitless future.

One would expect a compassionate and powerful person like Doctorow to be able to describe a variety of alternative families, not just LGBTQ parents, but those who choose new ways of defining relationship units altogether. Each type of family feels as natural as any other, and Doctorow is clever at recognizing the desires and whims of children. When Doctorow describes the communities of resistance that sprang up across Canada as the default cities began breaking down, you can see that his description of the Idle No More movement of First Nations radicals is meant to pay homage to both Occupy, and the nationwide revolt of First Nation bands that rocked Canada in 1995. There is a lot of history of radical organizing in these pages, and a lot of history of the future that has yet to be experienced, at least for those of us who have not yet learned how to remember forward, and are shackled by our sequential illusions of time.

Doctorow might be criticized for giving us a stereotypical view of Natalie/Iceweasel's "zotta" father, Jacob Redwater. Could a ruthless holder of 1% power and privilege really sacrifice his family and millions of people worldwide to hold a small financial gain over others in the ultra-rich community? Even if Redwater seems an archetype, Doctorow's point seems to be a comparison of 1% zotta privilege and white privilege: The 1% (or most of them) truly believe in their heart of hearts that they were biologically meant to rule the planet on behalf of the 99%. If any member of the zotta class was to make any break in the armor, it would create a societal collapse as any sense of appropriate hierarchy was broken down. In that sense, it is somewhat like the otherwise intelligent and liberal people who believed in eugenics theory early in the 20th century. Redwater cannot envision a world of default rupture in which hierarchies collapse and the world goes walkaway, because that would imply everything the zottas knew about biological and social destiny was wrong.

When walkaways suffer injustices at the hands of the zottas, the video and documented results are instantly fed globally to other walkaways via new forms of darknets. Default society desperately does not want to create martyrs, to raise rallying cries that "This will be another Akron!" So something tells the reader that even if the book ends sadly, it cannot be through the employment of extreme violence by zottas, because martyrs would be guaranteed. But to achieve a society that is walkaway by default, the walkaways must perform much more than the DIY technological miracles they accomplish throughout the book. (Special mention must be made of Etcetera's fleet of zeppelins, a 21st century equivalent of the 19th-century Chums of Chance zeppelins in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.) The walkaways must accomplish much more than the mere avoidance of violence, so as not to be branded "terrorists." They must burrow into the minds and assumptions of the defenders of 1% culture, and ultimately make society collapse by getting the zottas to internalize the belief that they themselves have been living lies, and are individually of no worth to society through their money and power. Their only worth comes through the diffuse power of walkaway.

Even though this book may not go down as a classic of literature, it is a powerful story of societal and cultural reformation that will challenge virtually everyone's assumptions about what it means to hold or accept power, what it means to work without ego for a more just planet, and what one gains and loses by simply walking away.

[The Angry Lawn Gnome · Rating 2 out of 5]

tl;dr - This was painful to read, the literary equivalent of shuffling through knee deep wet concrete. I kept expecting it to get better, it didn't.

So, (he asked rhetorically), can William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson all be wrong? Based upon the blurbs for this book, yup, yup, yup. Either that or they all read the super secret version that has not yet been released unto the eyes of the profane, since I honestly see no way they read this turkey.

Characters randomly popped in and out of the narrative for no particular reason, characters dropped tedious sermons to each other (and to the reader) without prompting and (again) for no particular reason and the characters were all as flat and uninteresting as cardboard standees. The good guys were all good, good, good, the bad guys all bad, bad, bad. And of course we needed -- had to have -- a diversity checklist for our characters. Except for the bad guys. Since villains can only be, always and forever, white males, in the sort of Calvinism without redemption that is the major theme of the Left in 2017. Virtuous vaginas, problematic penises, and white people suck.

The plot, such as it was, consisted of deux ex machina after deux ex machina, though since the "deux" was "some weird invention we cooked up in our basement via some McGyver shit that was even less believable than the 1980s TV show, oh and we're gonna do it every third page or so," perhaps that should be technologica ex machina? Machina ex machina? Who the fuck knows? Or cares? And transitions? Cory didn't need none of them. 'Cuz there aren't any. I guess Tor can't afford editors these days? 'Cuz there was fuck all in the narrative in this book.

The dialog? Holy fuck. The was the worst best part, in the sense that it was absolutely hilarious, hopefully by intention. I don't think I've read so much 1337 hAx0R speak in years, nor seen the word "pwn" used outside of Call of Duty lobbies on XBox, circa 2011. Cory is down with the Fellow Kids, yessirree bobber. Cory gonna pwn u spawn camping zotta n00bz with his 360 no scope insta-kill, cuz he is pure d MLG 4 real and 4 life.



So, that part, at least, was fucking hilarious. Like I said, hopefully by intent. Legit belly laughs, though by the end of the book it had taken on overtones of cringe. You can only read about "pwning" this or that so often, after all. Attacks of giggles get downright painful if taken to extremes.

Two stars, mostly for those chuckles.

Oh, and how could I forget the most bizarre thought that occurred to me? The one that kept me marginally involved in the text from start to finish, drinking coffee and snorting with glee, instead of DNF-ing this turkey half way or even less through it? Well, early on and through the book, the following thoughts occurred me:

Where had I read a book about the talented walking out of society and going their own way?
Where had I read about about setting up a place apart for the anointed to go to once they separated?
Where had I read a book chock full of two dimensional, humorless, sermon dropping characters?
Where had I read a book where the good guys were always and forever good, the bad guys always and forever bad, and you never needed a score card to tell 'em apart§?
Where had I read a book of pseudo-philosophy where the opponent's arguments are always presented in the most ridiculous and straw-man terms?
Where had I read a book where a main character was kidnapped, tortured and released via some of the most preposterous plot nonsense I'd ever seen?

Hmmm. I said to myself. Then suddenly, was all like, Hot damn! Yup. We're talking Atlas Shrugged, updated and inverted in Walkaway. And I'll bet if I put my thinking cap on I could come up with more parallelisms, but,meh, why bother? I think that's enough.

Just substitute a fairy tale like Objectivism for a fairy tale like post scarcity economics, just switch your bad guy gauge from "Looters" to "zottas," keep the kinky sex, keep the altogether completely predictable plot, keep the action boring and ridiculous dialogue, keep the characters monologuing away, keep the gubbiment the source of all that is eeevvulll, and hey presto magico, you get from Atlas Shrugged to Hipster Shrugged, err, Walkaway in a few simple steps.

Feel free to try this at home. Maybe you'll get a publishing contract with Tor out of it. Though, come to think of it, I wonder how the folks at Tor, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of McMillian, Inc., which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of German based multi-national corporation Holtzbrink (that last a truly big-ass 4 real multinational conglomerate run by "zottas," presumably) feel about a book where one of the central themes (repeated ad nauseum) is how icky poo that whole copyright business is? I guess Cory is okay taking their money and not feeling like a hypocrite for doing so, because, well, umm, err, ahhh, ... because he just doesn't.

Ahh, madness, madness, let us end this silliness on that note.

§ - The lone exception to this one being Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged. No such character existed to elicit the sympathy he did in Atlas Shrugged in Walkaway, sadly. Might have made the prose slightly less turgid in Doctorow's book. And also makes it pretty sad when Ayn Rand "pwns" Doctorow in terms of creating likable characters, even if it is only one, no?

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Futuristic anarchist manifesto... Plain and overwhelmed with technicalities, but the topics raised in the book getting more and more relevant: corporate greed, ecology, unemployment etc. Enjoy the happy end cos in reality things may not end so well.

[Nikki Whipple · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cool ideas but I got bogged down with the preachy dialogue.

[Fiona Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second read. Still just as hard to review and read, and still just as hard hitting as it was the first time around - this is an amazing book.

This is a really hard book to review, but on the other hand - I loved it.

It's not an easy book to read; I'm a reader who'll make her way through the average novel in half a day, and this took me a solid week. It's not a book you can skim or speed read through - every so often, in the middle of an escape or situating into a new moment, a character will begin a soliloquy. If you're not paying attention, it's easy to lose track.

The world of Walkaway is all too easy to see developing around us even now - it's one of the more plausible paths the future could be heading to. Automation abounds, the gap between rich and poor has widened drastically, and society, as a whole, is on the edge of revolution. More and more people are just walking away, bringing the "defaults" closer to the tipping point where they will have to act, or lose their majority.

This book made me think, constantly, with every new scenario raised. I'll be mulling it over for some time, and I really can see this one taking it's place in the ranks of the classics, to be discussed, and fought about, and analysed for years to come.

I was provided with a copy of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

[Caitlin Grabarek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a “meh” 3.5 out of 5 stars. I was actually very engaged throughout this story and I can definitely see why Edward Snowden is a fan. It’s a mixed bag review. There’s some really great stuff in this book mixed with things that are distracting and don’t make sense.

Let’s start with what this book does well. The walkaway culture is probably the most workable and realistic alternative to capitalism I’ve read in the sci-fi genre in a long time. Unlike Ursula Le Guin’s rigidly controlled socialist “anarchist” planet Anarres, the Walkaway mini-civilizations are vibrant and innovative frontier maker/hacker communities that more closely resemble pre World Wide Web online network communities than dry Fabian socialist groups. It’s refreshing to see large corporations brought low not by a plucky band of rebels but by a global paradigm shift they are unable to understand well enough to respond to. The decentralization of energy sources and 3D printing gives people in this world a plausible incentive to opt out of default society, even if I have some doubts about the post-scarcity nature of this world (more on that later).

Now for my complaints...

1. I have the same issue reading Cory Doctorow as I once did reading Orson Scott Card (I didn’t know OSC was a homophobic douchepickle when I read Ender’s Game in high school). Despite attempts at backstory and descriptions of physical attributes, every character thinks, talks, and emotes just like Cory Doctorow. There’s Parent Function Cory Doctorow (Etcetera), Cory Doctorow with tits (Natalie/Iceweasel), Cory Doctorow with bigger tits (Gretyl), AI Cory Doctorow (Dis), trans Cory Doctorow (Tam), Brazilian nudist Cory Doctorow (Limpopo), Black Cory Doctorow (Seth), and Eastern European mercenary Cory Doctorow with tits (I forget already). All of the characters are snarky, overly intellectual navel gazing STEM geeks and I pictured every one of them with a body and Cory Doctorow’s face pasted on top.

2. Raw materials? So even though the walkways keep getting their digs burned down by shitty paramilitary preppers, they can almost effortlessly rebuild because they can recycle and 3D print everything. Okay, but How Do Thing? You need to put raw materials into a 3D printer if you want to 3D print. Supposedly, they can send drones of unspecified size and design to extract raw materials, but mining is a lot more machine intensive and complex.

3. No one gets angry or vengeful after people burn down their houses and murder their friends. Not even once. That’s not how humans work.

4. I’ve heard this book described as sexy. Huh? I’m not feeling it. Characters hook up with zero romantic tension and become an item immediately afterward. Everyone is bisexual because future, but conveniently, we only explicitly see some straight sex and then A LOT of girl on girl. It’s almost as though the creator of this universe were a horny software developer who only remembered to include sex that got his own nuts hard. Boooooooooooring.

Sum total, this is a book chock full of good ideas, but I had a hard time believing that this could be a reality unless the future is a bunch of multi-cultural Cory Doctorow clones having sex with each other and populating the world with a society of baby Cory Doctorows willing matter to recombine at the molecular level with only the power of their minds. You know what? We Are Legion We Are Cory is by far not the worst sci-fi concept I’ve read this month.

[Karl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed with WALKAWAY. There was some great 'world building' but I did not connect with the characters or their motivations. I liked the original premise but I found the story to be disjointed and the pacing confused me in a couple places.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sigh. The first Doctorow book I wanted to walkaway from.

I love Doctorow. I fell in love with Makers and never looked back. So, after Pirate Cinema, I was waiting for something new, and this book read in the byline like a new Makers. I was elated. Sadly, it was not.

The problem with this book was that it was just so sure of itself the whole time. The future was bleak, and rightfully so, but nothing felt tangible. The people were always spewing pages long rabble like a conversation between university students after a bong sesh. It was just so blatantly anti-establishment that there felt like there was no story.

Brief periods of intense plot building fell away to a monologue about .001%ers, and somehow this spun into downloading consciousness, but nothing ever materialized.

I hate, hate, hate, to knock a Doctorow book. His language was incredible, the characters lovable and detestable all at once, but nothing resonated to make it a cohesive read. It felt preachy and Doctorow is at his best when he preaches through the layers of plot, not outright riffing for seemingly endless periods on philosophical and economical world issues. I almost would have preferred this as a form of non-fiction, some sort of philosophical journey with bits of potential fortune telling.

I would recommend only for true Doctorow fans, because there is a lot to love here. But it won't be for everyone.

[Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We’re not doing nations anymore. We’re doing people, doing stuff. Nations mean governments, passports, borders.”

Kim Stanley Robinson meets Ursula K. LeGuin with vibrant page turning characters. Not a call to arms but a call to think - a new classic.

Everyone should read Walkaway.

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freedom to Leave Capitalism...

1) Fictional Style:
--Doctorow’s novel was a slow burner. Reading Kim Stanley Robinson should have prepared me for this gonzo writing style of presenting speculative futures:
-New York 2140
-The Ministry for the Future
…however, Doctorow’s story seemed a few degrees zanier, starting with names like Iceweasel, Limpopo, and Etcetera. It’s a shame such stylistic trivialities can still impact our reading experience with fiction.
--I listened to the audiobook on my commutes, with one memorable commute where I had a full bladder during what felt like a never-ending sex scene.

2) Non-Fictional Substance:
--Scarred by that excruciating experience, it took me over the halfway mark before getting into some of the scenarios (capitalist father, mercenary, prison) from a story-telling perspective, but I still didn’t find the sociopolitical commentary engaging.
--For this genre, the bar was set high for me by Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. Of course, my favourite is Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present given its depth in nonfiction substance, which fiction readers seem allergic to.
…I also recently read the 1975 Ecotopia: A Novel, which took a back-to-the-earth approach focusing on rebuilding socioecological relationships (thus addressing my biggest question; so much to build on, ex. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants).
…Doctorow’s novel didn’t offer much on this, taking a different direction with quirky futuristic technologies which to me was mostly stylistic distractions. The only exception which provided some thought-experiments (no pun intended) involved booting a simulation of the mind to preserve it beyond the body’s mortality, and how this plays out for the walkaways vs. the status quo.
--My nonfiction gears only started turning on the very last page (that’s one advantage of writing reviews afterwards, to reassess), where the “Acknowledgements” cite 3 nonfiction books as key influences:

i) Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster:
--Solnit explores the bottom-up resilience/community building during crises as an alternative process contending with the top-down opportunism of Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
--The “walkaways” occupying abandoned places remind me of the first basic freedom (freedom to leave: “expectations that make freedom of movement possible – the norms of hospitality and asylum, civility and shelter”) in Graeber/Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Although this is more difficult in modern times with the proliferation of nation-states and their surveillance powers, there are still recent examples of parallel systems (most notably the Zapatistas). As nation-states continue to ossify under capitalism’s many contradictions (esp. ecological, financial, social reproduction), more cracks should offer new spaces for alternative experimentations.
…How different structural incentives bring out the better or worse aspects of our contradictory potentials seem to be best portrayed in the novel’s antagonists (capitalist father, mercenary, soldiers), reminding me of introduction of the dystopian status quo’s fireman in Fahrenheit 451.
…“Walkaway” soldiers is a topic that deserves a lot more attention, from anti-war veterans (War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier) to class analysis of the military (ex. general coups vs. colonel coups “Free Officers”; relations with fascism vs. communism/decolonial nationalism etc.).

ii) Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years:
--Speaking of Graeber, this is the Occupy-era book that sparked social imagination on the range of social relations, and how these are corrupted by money (with the corruption normalized as if it is “human nature”/Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?): precise (and inaccurate) quantification, impersonal and transferrable exchange (market commodification), backed by the violence of state-power (state-issued coins to mobilize the public to provision armies), etc.
…I’m still in the middle of re-reviewing Graeber’s books (they were major early influences), given the critiques of the 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

iii) Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century:
--I remember in 2013 when this book came out; I immediately started reading it but stopped when I finally started to distinguish:
a) Neoclassical (i.e. mainstream economics) vulgarization:
--Even when reformists like Piketty/Krugman/Stiglitz have the appearance of Keynesian political arguments for a redistributive welfare state, this “Keynesianism” is really the US New Dealer reformists who rejected key proposals of the real-life Keynes after WWII (see Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy).
--Behind the political rhetoric, this group’s economic theory is so-called “Neo-Keynesian”, which is also known as the “Neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis”; in essence, Neoclassical economics coopted the (already watered-down) post-WWII Keynesianism.
b) Critical political economy:
--We can contrast the above with Keynesians who are strong critiques of Neoclassical economics, i.e. “Post Keynesian” like Steve Keen (The New Economics: A Manifesto, which summarizes the Neoclassical vulgarization of Keynes).
…I was also getting into Varoufakis (see this interview critiquing Piketty’s book and Neoclassical framing) and Michael Hudson (see this interview and this interview critiquing Piketty’s book; Hudson also debated Piketty).
…Since Piketty’s 2013 best-seller (although one has to wonder how many buyers actually read his book rather than using it as a decorative prop; I didn’t even bother finishing it!), apparently Piketty has become more critical, so perhaps I’ll revisit to see how useful of a bridge his works are (he seems like the “economist” that Western progressives cite, including fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson).

[Root_rambler · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just WALK AWAY from this one. I got annoyed at it 1/3 of the way through and wrote an impassioned review, but decided I should wait to post until I finished the book. It did not improve, and I skimmed the remainder, getting more and more annoyed at Doctorow's flat and unsympathetic characters, habit of telling instead of showing, gratuitous sex, and lack of coherent plot/subject. If drastically edited (1/3 of its length?) with a coherent theme, this book could have been good. The worst sentence of the book, on p. 331, might be this one: "Both boys babbled and shouted. Then Jacob got so excited he punched Stan, because reasons." BECAUSE REASONS?

This novel is trying to be a novel of ideas, but they’re constantly tossed out and never thoroughly examined. Doctorow seems to think that it’s enough to have his characters examine ideas thusly: Character 1: “Hey THIS LONG POLITICAL IDEA.” Character 2: “WHAT ABOUT COMPLICATED OPPOSING IDEA THO I WILL TALK FOR PARAGRAPHS.” Doctorow too often explains things, as in this dialogue, rather than showing them. We are bombarded with a constant stream of techno-jargon, but not in a way which is easy to visualize. Almost any of these back-and-forths, thoroughly explored, could be the subject of a novel in and of itself.

Characters are descriptions, not personalities: the “rich girl burdened by her former richness,” “generic dude with lots of names who is good mostly at sex,” and “the other guy in the trio” and “lady whose guilty pleasure is feeling better than everyone else,” “evil zottarich father,” etc. They never grow in any significant way, they just get older.

The book starts out by presenting the walkaway society as being diametrically opposed to "default" society with its extreme imbalance of wealth and "zottarich" people. Presumably this default society is free-market capitalism without any governmental checks, although this is never explained. Our two male walkaways are chronically unemployed (probably because everything is mechanized - surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to bother them very much). The world they walk into is described as “post-scarcity” by the female walkaway. Drones scavenge raw materials to supply fab labs, which can scan you and make you new clothes whenever you want. It is not a world of hardship. I didn’t believe it. Where are all these raw materials coming from? Why haven’t they run out if they are scavenged? Was there some big collapse that is not explained anywhere? Where is walkaway land in physical space anyway? Does it surround every city? Is it one bloc?

This brave new world is built through the omniscence of the programmed machine. Despite this fact, the characters spend almost no time programming or debugging. Instead, they gallivant about. I found this, frankly, unbelievable. Are we to believe that a machine knows how to solve every problem? (Problems change!) That there is no room for new human technological innovation or for skill and craft? What happens when the program makes a mistake (perhaps fatal) - who is blamed? What is the fallout?

This strategy of machine omniscence is in opposition to a condemmed strategy of gamification and leaderboard stats. I don’t know why the only options here are to gamify society (resulting in fights? Why?) or have a machine take responsibility? This dichotomy made little sense to me. I’ve lived in cooperatives, and they did not run either on machines or gamification, but on human social skills and cooperation. Doctorow does not seem to think that this is a strategy of the future. Maybe in Doctorow’s world the nerdy male LEET hackorz don’t want to learn social skills?

I thought this theme might get explored in more detail, but halfway through, the novel switched themes and instead became a story about what would happen if we uploaded peoples’ consciousness into the cloud so they could never really die. But again, this was not thoroughly examined, and then the novel became a breaking-friends-out-of-captivity story. All of the previous themes remained as well, incoherently clanking around and coming up occasionally in long-winded dialogues.

I was so dissatisfied philosophically with this book that, a third of the way through, went to the library to pick up Shop Class as Soulcraft. I would highly recommend that book as an antidote to this one.

[Allison Hurd · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was the sort of social scifi I am often looking for. I thought this had a lot of great moments and hope, and maaaybe a bit too much melodrama. 3.5 rounded up because I would recommend it and will definitely seek out more by this author.

CONTENT WARNINGS (just a list of topics): torture, mutilation, medical experimentation, bombing civilians, child abuse, racism.

Things to love:

-The cast. Delightfully varied and lovingly drawn. Yes, this checks pretty much all the inclusion check boxes, but their differences are not the focus, except when those differences WOULD be the focus, socially.

-The concepts. Rejoice all of you who've serious-joked about starting a commune in your old age with your friends. This is about an alternative to communism where instead of everyone owning everything in common, everyone realizes they own nothing and hold it in common for the others. Feeds right into my anarcho-communist tendencies. Add into that the advent of virtual upload/AI singularity, space colonization and it's like step one on the path from where we are today to Terra Ignota.

-The arc. Okay, so yes, it got a bit cutesy, and yes, the "good guys" always miraculously won, but I do think the author put a lot of time thinking into downsides and offering...cathartic, neat solutions for them. But hey, Plato did that, too, so who am I to say that's not good philosophy?

-The narration. With the unfortunate exception of how other narrators read Tam, this is a really fun way to read the book. I recommend the audiobook if you are okay with one character being interpreted in 3 vastly different ways through the course of the book.

Things that needed more consideration:

-The romances. A few interesting notes. There is A LOT of graphic sex used as a lead up to discuss deep philosophical concepts. I think it was supposed to be a "what if de Sade's methods WEREN'T abusive?" look at the philosophy but...at a certain point it felt less like a thought experiment and more like the author saying "okay, about to lecture you, so here's a quick tickle to keep you focused." Also there were a few weird moments of infidelity and a surprising lack of discussion around the draw this culture would be to people who were polyamorous.

-Pacing. There were a few parts that could have been trimmed down substantially and not harmed the narrative.

I really enjoyed it, and am glad to have had a sort of hopeful look at a post scarcity/post apocalypse. It's a rarity for me, and a welcome break.

[Johannes Kleske · Rating 2 out of 5]

So Walkaway is Cory Doctorow’s first adult novel since Makers, which came out eight years ago and has been hugely influential as a future scenario in some circles like the fab lab communities. I picked up Walkaway with high expectations to learn how Doctorow’s perspective on a possible future has evolved over the last years. I also always had tremendous respect for his non-fiction work and activism for privacy, copyright law, and open source.
That leads me to my first huge problem with Walkaway: it’s just a slightly updated version of Makers. Until you get to the uploading/singularity stuff somewhere in the middle of the book, it’s the same. Fab Labs and 3d printers, a world running on Github-like repositories, tribal communities governed by open source policies, etc. Throughout the first third of the book, I thought the only thing new that Doctorow has discovered throughout the last years are Japanese Onsen, which are featured prominently.
Once the brain uploading/AI stuff gets introduced into the story, it gets a bit more interesting. But in general, it feels very much like a revision of Makers to me instead of a new and fresh novel with a new world.
That brings me to my second big problem with Walkaway, which Doctorow can’t do much about. I used to like his books. But it has been some time since I’ve read one. And now I’m not sure anymore if this is not written as well as the others or if my taste has just moved on. Maybe Doctorow’s fiction is not for me anymore. I think I’m caring much more about storytelling and interesting characters than technology predictions and rebellion against the system these days. Walkaway is categorized as an adult novel, but it still feels mostly like young-adult fiction, just with more awkward sex scenes. The characters seem to be taken from the book of liberal stereotypes and are terribly overdrawn. The same goes for the violence and the oppressive state and corporations. While reading this book, I couldn’t shake the image of the author persona of a rebellious, horny, teenage nerd describing his fantasy world. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just not interested in it (anymore).
So instead of Walkaway, my recommendation is to pick up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents for a dystopian world of oppression in which a new community is built. And I still rather reread Charlie Stross’ Accelerando for a future scenario about uploading and the singularity.

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Video Review:

https://youtu.be/Y-xaRi_7x8E

There are some things I loved. There is tons of diversity with pan, bi, lesbian characters as well as POC characters. I liked the science and ideas of a possible future, but there were a fair amount of things I didn't.

[Ric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay friends, if you like negative reviews then strap in because there aren’t many positive things I can say about this book. Walkaway was my first Doctorow book, and I don’t like to judge authors on just one book, but this wasn’t a good start for me. I like to start off reviews for books that I didn’t like with a positive from the book, but I really can’t think of one so here come the problems. But just as a warmup, an actual phrase from this novel to describe a character is “cute as a cute thing”.

First of all, I had so many problems with the characters. Everyone in this book had a really stupid name and it was terribly distracting. Iceweasel, Limpopo, Kersplebedeb (which I can’t even pronounce), and that doesn’t even count one character who’s known as Etcetera because he has 20 first names. Seriously. All of the characters motivations were very unclear, none of them had any actual reason to “walk away”, or if they did than it wasn’t known in the novel at all.

There was also a weirdly high amount of sexual stuff in this novel too. At the beginning, they talk about the communal baths that were at their first home base and mentioned repeatedly how they weren’t sexual in nature at all, but they led to pretty much every main character’s relationship and way too graphic sex scenes (seriously, the first one was like three pages long and it was uncomfortable, and it didn’t get any better or shorter from there).

I’ve never read a novel that was so liberal with its use of time jumps at all, especially since they didn’t tell the readers how long of a jump it was or that there even was one to begin with. Characters were captured and then all of a sudden they were back without any real explanation of how they got back or reunion with the other characters. Or the group will be forced out of their home and have a new one that’s twice as big that they built from scratch by the next chapter. One chapter, the characters are young, and the next they’ll randomly have grey hair and kids. They introduced new characters with no exposition on them because they were part of the group for years, but not the years we saw. It was annoying and confusing.

And lastly, the whole “walk away” thing was flat out stupid an unnecessary. Realistically, it was just a backdrop for the war between the walkaways and society over their attempts to build technology to upload their consciousness to some sort of mainframe in order to cheat death. Those consciousnesses that were updated early turned out to be the worst deus ex machina, so much so that it was actually referenced in the book at one point that they basically solved everything because plot.

All in all, I feel like I wasted my time reading this, which really sucks. Obviously you never want to dislike a book, and I really don’t like giving books one star, but I really did not enjoy this one at all.

[Cynthia Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually found this book a lot more enjoyable than expected, given that I'm not much of a sci-fi reader nor have I ever been to Burning Man (and have absolutely no intention to do so).

[RG · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just didnt connect with this one. Alot of conversations/ideas on I'm guessing the authors views on philosophy etc. Just wasnt for me

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it starts off with promise, but kinda fizzles in the middle and finishes up in a disjointed way. Just kinda felt unfinished. On top of that much felt like artificially-forced political correctness - like it was trying too much to show a specifically idealized future.

I think it would have been better if Doctorow hadn't tried so hard to make the ending something resembling 'happy'. It just didn't fit the rest of the book.

Overall not bad, but not great.

[reherrma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Walkaway" ist ein Buch, was die Leserschaft (insbesondere die SF-Fans) spalten wird wie kein anderes in der näheren Vergangenheit. Angesiedelt in der nahen Zukunft, auf einer erschöpften und der Klimawandlung unterworfenen Erde, beherrscht von Macht- und Geldgierigen Superreichen (im Roman Zotta's genannt), die die kapitalisteschen Gesellschaft (hier "der Default" genannt) auf der ganzen Welt (es gibt nur noch kapitalistische Staaten auf der Welt) beherrschen. Es bildet sich eine Gegenbewegung, die sog. Walkaway's, die aus dieser Gesellschaftsordnung aussteigen und eine quasi anarchistische Bewegung gründen. Anarchie ist hier allerdings das falsche Wort, in dieser Gesellschaft gibt es sehr wohl Regeln, an denen eisern festgehalten wird. Niemand darf sich über die anderen stellen und ihnen ihren Willen aufzwingen. Diese utopische Gesellschaft funktioniert auch deshalb, weil durch die fortgeschrittene Technologie fast alles, was man zum Leben braucht, mit Hilfe von Computern und 3D-Druckern kostenlos hergestellt werden kann. In der normalen Gesellschaft (der Default) ist das aber verpönt, hier gilt weiterhin die Macht des Geldes. Waren werden hier durch Patente, Markenrecht und Kopierschutzmechanismen künstlich verknappt und weiterhin verkauft.
Doctorow stellt in seinem Roman die Frage: Wie könnte eine Gesellschaft aussehen, in der theoretisch alles Materielle im Überfluss vorhanden ist? Seine Antwort: Es kommt zum Krieg. Denn die Zottas haben Angst davor, ihr privilegiertes Leben, das auf ökonomischer Ausbeutung beruht, zu verlieren. Deshalb versuchen sie die Walkaways, die eben die Auflösung wirtschaftlicher Zwänge in einer Post-Knappheits-Gesellschaft propagieren, mit lückenloser Überwachung, psychologischer Zersetzung und militärischer Macht auszuradieren.
Neben diesem Stachel im Fleisch der Zottas treibt die Technologie der Walkaways (die vorwiegend aus brillianten Köpfen aus allen Wissenschaftsbereichen zu bestehen scheinen) noch weitere Innovationen voran, insbesondere eine Technologie, die es erlaubt, das eigene Bewußtsein als Kopie in der Cloud zu betreiben. Keine echte Unsterblichkeit, aber doch irgendwie die Angst vor dem Tod nehmend, verschärft das die Konflikte zusätzlich. Denn wenn diese Technologie jedem zur Verfügung steht und keiner mehr Angst vorm Sterben haben muss, verlieren die mächtigen Zottas ihr letztes Druckmittel gegenüber den Armen und Aussteigern...
Die Handlung wird zwar aus der Perspektive einzelner Charaktere dargestellt, die leben, lieben und auch sterben, gleichzeitig stehen diese Figuren aber auch für bestimmte Philosophien und Konzepte.
In den, über weite Strecken vorherrschenden Dialogen werden auch spannende Fragen erörtert; Ist eine Gesellschaft ohne Geld möglich? Welchen Lebenszweck hat ein Mensch, wenn er sich nicht mehr beweisen kann? Und wie ändert sich das alles, wenn man sein Bewusstsein als Software betreiben kann? usw.usf.
"Walkaway" ist ein wichtiges Buch in unserer Zeit, das ein mögliches Denkmodell einer zukünftigen, utopischen Gesellschaft darstellt, man muß nicht mit allen Thesen übereinstimmen, aber man muß Doctorows Imaginationsfähigkeit anerkennen, solch ein Szenario auszuarbeiten.
Daneben ist "Walkaway" aber auch ein ungemein spannendes Buch mit überragenden Charakteren und mit glaubhaften, technologieschen Innovationen...

[Lisa Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is speculative fiction at its best--extrapolating our future from our present. At a time when the top 1% has narrowed to be the top 0.001% and technology has replaced nearly all workers, the surplus people walkaway to join others in the abandoned places who choose to live a different way. It is a choice that may cost them their lives.Doctorow is always hopeful, but never naive.

[Kathi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, I really seem to have bad luck with books during quarantine. It's like Corona wants to STOP me from reading books...insane! I felt so guilty for taking so long to read this book that I didn't even visit Goodreads anymore, feeling like an undeserving imposter (that, and the fact that I'd procrastinated on my own reviews. My laziness knows no boundaries!) that doesn't have the right anymore to even be looking at books... Hadn't I actually switched gears and set myself reading goals of at least xx pages a day with iron-clad disciplin, I'd still be reading this books 30 years from now on. Not because it's so good that I want to savour every page. Not because I have a thousand other things to do (even though I do and did, Netflix having been a very faithful companion those last few weeks). No. It's because this book is complete and utter SHIT.
You may recheck at this point if I really and actually gave Walkaway 3 stars (2.5 in fact) And yes, I did. I can only explain it with two words: Stockholm Syndrome. This book has held me captive for several unnecessary weeks. It took me two weeks alone for the first 100 pages, that's how terrible it was. I want to write that I've never read a book with such horrible writing, but then I had to remind myself that I've read Deborah Harkness, so it wouldn't be fair to Cory Doctorow. I can and willsay, though, that in terms of first and second place for worst writing, there's not much distance between him and Ms. Harkness. It's a close race, and if I were a bit more of a feminist I'd hate Cory Doctorow even more just for the reason that he writes like the stereotypical "man" that feminists usually (and in this case, rightly) criticize. I hope he felt very smart describing the technological details in the book as complicated as he could've so that even me (who isn't a complete goon when it comes to technology) had no clue what the hell he was talking about most of the time. I felt very stupid while reading Walkaway, and usually I have absolutely no problems reading books in English. It just broke me. At one point my self-esteem was so low and I was so insecure about my comprehension skills, that I actually started to parallel-read the German version, which, unfortunately, wasn't much clearer either. That's because the writing is a catastrophe in both languages, which was only to be expected, given that translations have to stay true to the original quality. There was an unnecessary amount of gratifying sex scenes (the first one spawns over several pages and it was neither erotic nor interesting nor did it serve any story value. It was just DUMB), and the phrasing of sentences in general was beyond terrible. The author can't write to save his life; there were actual writing mistakes in the novel and it's horrible that even a non-native speaker like me can recognise them. Maybe the book could've been better had someone else written it; it definitely couldn't have been worse. But so much was messed up in terms of story in general, that I really can't be too sure. The characters' names alone were a complete and utter joke: the main character Etcetera has twenty names. TWENTY. This was supposed to be funny, but it's not. Then there are actual characters called Limpopo (I know it's a river, but still. It's even funnier because Popo is butt in german), Iceweasel (no kidding) and Kersplebedeb (it took me several tries to spell it correctly; I wonder how many times the author failed at this), and the best thing about it, most of them have the exact same (basic) personalities. The only ones I could actually tell apart from their inner monologue were Etcetera, Seth and Iceweasel, and those were the only ones I actually cared about. The other characters were all the same to me, and often I missed how even spoke what sentence. They felt robotic and lacked any emotional depth that would make them accessible to the reader. The dialogue structure in the book didn't make it any easier; the characters in the novel really like to hear themselves tal, so it's fat paragraph after fat paragraph and you're never sure if it's the same still talking or if this (next) paragraph is (finally) the reply from another person (I did pay attention to the speech characters. It just didn't help!!!). The story idea of an utopian way of living in a society was a good one, but the execution was terrible. Even though it is explained dozens and dozens of (unnecessary) times, it's still not clear how the Walkaway society really (and successfully) functions. Everytime they walk away and build their destroyed or taken homes anew because they don't fight, and nobody ever gets frustrated? Nobody ever thinks just once about cheating and nobody ever cares if their stuff is stolen? I get that it's a philosophy and that many characters continuously have to adapt to it because it's not an easy one, but this is basically utopia. The story idea of making it a technological race between default and utopia over who's first in cheating death by uploading their consciousnesses is quite a trite and uninspiring one, and ulimately I felt cheated myself - but of a good story instead. I can imagine why people love this novel; it's a very communistic one and everyone not in love with today's society can see the value in that. But it's not realistic, and the battering on the rich got old real fast. Don't get me wrong: I hate injustice! The disparity between poor and rich is horrible. But just shitting on the rich whilst making the walkaways saints-like characters isn't the solution. There isn't one problematic walkaway in the novel; NOT ONE. At the beginning there was, and even this character "saw the light" and died a martyr death because of it (because the poor walkaways are always destroyed by the evil rich). What a preachy, cheap, unnecessary way of convincing the readers of his oh-so-great idea of a new society. It read like an advertisement for walkaways, and therefore put me off all the more. And so much stuff in the novel was just plain unnecessary (not only the afore-mentioned sex scenes). I think it's great that there was a trans character included without making too much of a big deal of it, yay to that! But a big nay to mentioning (in the very last chapter of the novel) another character transitioning in one side-sentence (!!!), casually as if this sort of thing happen all the time, after having given absolutely no clue to that character being or having felt trans before. It felt so weird!!! It felt like it was put there more as an anecdote, as some sort of joke, which this should never be. Then there were those absolutely weird time jumps. They happened absolutely randomly and were all the more confusing. I have no problem with time jumps if they're justified and explained well, but we don't even get to know how much time has passed! In one chapter the characters have just been chased out of their homes (luckily, they're walkaways and have no quarrel with that, because they're above everything - you see how that gets annoying?) and the next chapter they suddenly have a home that's even bigger, already conveniently built (by them, but they don't fret hard work, because they're walkaways and better than everyone) How much time has passed? Nobody the fuck knows. You just have to accept it. Some ideas were interesting, I give you that. The idea of uploading everytime you have a cold, and just discarding the "old" body for a new one without a cold (it was only mentioned in a side-sentence, but still) was SO intriguing, as were other ideas (though some of them were really concerning). Most of it, though, was just plain, trite stuff about war, a war of technology and ideology. And that war wasn't even very interesting to read, neither in general nor in detail. All those weapons...I don't care about drones, and mecha robots and what other weapons they used that 1) I can't even pronounce and 2) of which I don't even know what they look like or what they do! The end battle, which was basically just a war of one technological thing against the next, was completely incomprehensible to me and I think it's a cheap trick of making readers feel dumb on purpose. I had no idea what computer stuff they were even doing and I think it was described as inapproachable as possible just so the author can be boastful with his knowledge. This is not fair; and it's not cool. And actually it's exactly the thing he accuses other people of in the book, which makes it even more ironic. Personally, what I most enjoyed were the dynamics between Iceweasel and her father, because her father felt like the only 3-dimensional character in the book and because that was something that didn't have to rely on complicated-written technology. The whole book felt like a circlejerk to the author's skills and his personal views on society; and sex, while we're at it. Obviously there's mostly lesbian sex in the novel because that's hot to write. (don't get me wrong, I'm all for inclusion! But it's so stereotypical of a man to write lesbian sex scenes and not gay scenes; and also, the scene felt like it was written by a man, which is just weird when it's about lesbians). I wish I could write a really good rant-review about the book but I can't. I definitely hated it more at the beginning than in the end, but that's just because I got used to it. That's also the reason I had to give it 3 stars. Still, you shouldn't have to force yourself to get used to a book. Actually, I even had to force myself to even continue reading. Everyone told me to stop while I was still suffering through it. I developed actual anxiety from just looking at the book, it was horrible. Just couldn't even get myself to pick it up until I set myself those goals. Yesterday I was basically high on drugs after having finished it; I still can't believe that I actually beat this book (I don't want to DNF books; it's a principle of mine because I never give up hope that books get better. And some really do!) By now, I'm too tired to even write a rant review though. Reading this book killed many parts of me, and it'll be a long time till I finally won't feel so self-conscious about my English skills. And that's even though I know that the author made mistakes; I even sent pictures of scenes I didn't understand to my friend, asking if it was me or the author (it was the author), and I feel like it's horrible for an author to write in such a purposely convoluted way that it just makes the whole book a confusing, difficult to understand-mess. Cory Doctorow is exactly the kind of person I don't like and want to meet in real life, because I feel like people who make their things inaccessable by choice have some underlyining insecurity issues and need this to feel better about themselves. In the end, this book makes me sad. Sad, because it's so much wasted potential, sad, because it's also wasted a lot of reading time. I deeply regretted reading this book and would recommend it to absolutely no one. The few really interesting ideas and concepts, as well as the few emotional scenes (most of it was extremely robotic) don't make up for the horror and blandness that is the rest of it. A book isn't supposed to destroy you (in the way it destroyed me) during the reading process. It's just such shitty writing on so many levels. The worst thing is, the German translation isn't better, it's even worse, because the translator made SO MANY mistakes! I'd get the complicated parts that I had to fight through myself, but he completely butchered the easy parts instead, thereby completely changing the meaning and implication of the whole sentence! Sometimes, the meaning turned out to be the opposite in the German version than it was in the English one! This books just SUCKS in every language. I'm seriously considering contacting the German publisher about the translation, I have enough photo evidence (and that's even though I didn't start with the pictures until I was 3/4 through) because I feel like it's not fair to German-speaking readers who aren't that proficient in English and have to read it in German. That's why my Mum bought it (who doesn't speak English and hasn't read it yet) and from whom I have borrowed the book when I had difficulties with it myself. This book is incredibly expensive in German (even as an epub-file it's still incredible 15 Euro, which is more expensiv than the English paperback which is an actual copy and not only a virtual one) and has yet translated parts wrong that could've been translated by a high schooler, because those weren't even the complicated sentences. So yeah, I feel frustration with the book on a lot of levels. I feel like the author didn't give a fuck and tried too hard at the same time. I seriously don't understand one person who could give this book more than 3 stars; and honestly, I don't even want to. I really hate this book and I'm glad that I've finished it now. Even though I don't know the author and don't want to judge him too harshly, the way he has written it he repesents everything to me that Zottas represent to Walkaways in the book: preachy, sitting on a high horse, convinced of his privilege as an author as well as a "better person than the rest of us"; I just read parts of his biography and I'm not even surprised he didn't graduated from four different universities. I suspect he's even proud of that, why else put it up for public knowledge? I feel like he used Limpopo's character as a way of putting himself into the novel and presenting himself as some god-like entity, that yes, even though Limpopo and he have problems with craving recognition (his way of making her and himself more "humane" and his implicit bragging more acceptable, because everyone has their faults :(), is better than the rest of society because he doesn't give in to the norms of default. If he thinks he can delude anyone with that, he's up for a rude awakening because I'm sure I'm not the only one who can see the parallels between his personal life and Limpopo's. I'm really sick of authors making themselves part of the novel through a particular character (you're not that important), but it's even worse when theyre adjusting a god-like quality to this certain character. Limpopo is literally described as a superhero and messiah throughout the whole novel. How pathetic is this? So yeah, I am absolutely done with this shit. Terrible plot, terrible writing, terrible everything. Never reading anything by Cory Doctorow again. He doesn't even deserve a proper, well-written rant review. In the end, he would just take it as a compliment.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I scored the USB audiobook edition at a book tour stop by the the author. Doctorow pimped it hard. In addition, its the first audiobook I've bought on a stick. I'm not disappointed.

Firstly, this story is folk propaganda for an anarchist techno-utopia on the edge of the post-human singularity. Get that? To read this story, you have to have an ear for Media Lab speak . Its essential for understanding the zeitgeist of the future Doctorow is describing. Getting the author's Cliff Notes(tm) summary at the book tour stop went a long way toward appreciating this book.

Prose was good, but not great. However its very dense. You'd need to be very hip and tech savvy to 'get it' all. The story is also funny. In places I laughed-out-loud. I would have appreciated fewer, techno-future evangelical haranguings in the story. The naughty-bits were a mixed bag, but were too graphic for this to be a YA read.

Plot is a riff on the It's the Journey That Counts and Brain Uploading tropes. The 'fast-forwards' at the end were annoying.

World building is very detailed. The near-future tech is a nerd's wet-dream in the detail provided. I could find nothing beyond the ken. I was regularly amused with the tangential uses of tech described in the story. (“The street finds its own uses for things.” ) The political (Walkaway vs. Default) and cultural (Money & "stuff" vs. self actualization) realities of new tech are in constant illustration. If I have a complaint its that there are only token historical references. For example, I'd expect the sea level rise and climate collapse to feature more largely in the story.

A glaring hole in this story, has to do with how brilliant and hardworking all the Walkawayers are. There is a substantial bit of hand-waving over the need for highly and specially trained personnel, like medical professionals and 'hands-on' systems engineers, in the Walkaway techno-utopia. In the story, seemingly a graphics designer can turn a heap of obsolete cellphones into a super-computing cluster by writing a couple of lines of code. Also, things get done remarkably quickly.

In the present, very few North American 20-somethings or their elders have the STEM background to keep the industrial west (barely) ticking along. In Doctorow's future there is going to be a surfeit of these folks, enough to build the infrastructure of the Walkaway? Even if you assume the Walkaway is a fork of the Default, the care and feeding of a digital infrastructure needs a lot of skilled labor. The scope and scale of Walkaway would need a cohort of brilliant, women and men from several generations wrestling with old and new: software, hardware, and construction materials for at least a generation.

This edition has seven (7) narrators, some of them well known: Wil Wheaten (Ready Player One), Amber Benson (Lock In), Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls and Neil Gaiman's wife), Mirron Willis ( The Long Fall), Gabrielle de Cuir (Heart of the Comet), Lisa Renee Pitts and Justine Eyre. This creates a potpourri of voices and styles for the shifting POV of the chapters. Its very media-like. I've only heard this shifting narrators technique once or twice before. Most audiobooks use a single narrator to cap costs. The one glitch with this technique is when a narrator needs to speak in the voice of a character already 'coined' by a previous narrator. That brings me up short-- "That's not her voice!"

You'd have to be a fan of Doctorow, and a tech nerd to 'get' this book. Its very meaty. The parts on the politics of technology are enough make your head asplode. I don't pretend to have gotten it all, but it held my attention and I kept on reading. It was an education. I liked this story, but I can't recommend it to everyone. The story would have benefited from an old-skool literary editing to make it accessible to a broader audience.

A more accessible story by this author would be Makers, which is a smaller book. It is more involved with the 3D printer technology that is a part of the Walkaway story.

[David Agranoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

his book will divide readers for sure, and hell it gave me very mixed feelings. Well I have enjoyed interviews with Doctorow and his many blog posts I decided to read this because I just had not read any of his work before. I mean this book has blurbs from William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson (who called it a utopia- huh?) and Edward Snowden. Yeah that edward Snowden on a side note that is a heck of a blurb.

Walkaway is a near future speculative fiction novel that looks at the economical and societal effects of a world where traditional free-markets can't function. In this future 3D printers can make pretty much anything. Most jobs are a thing of history. There is of course the effects of global climate change and no one should thing this is an amazing future where were sit around just having fun. That said the main characters do enjoy life quite a with a very free attitude towards sex and sexuality and drugs.

The most interesting characters are Hubert etc, and Natalie whose father is one of the richest men in the world. The characters are a strong point in the book which is quite diverse. People of color, and various fluid forms of sexuality and gender make up the cast. They decide to join a class of refugees who walkaway from the system. Social networks and the economy are just part of what that means. Instead of staying in the cities begging for food the walkaways take over areas that are declared a loss due to ecological reasons. Seriously this is part of the reason I can't understand the utopia moniker being thrown around. OK there is alot of sex but the setting and conditions were hardly ideal.

Doctorow clearly is reacting to the occupy movement re-casts the 1% as Zottas and Occupy movement is reflected in the people who live in default (or walkaway). There are various methods used through out the book to debate various forms of anarchist philosophy and certainly the author does not take a clear position. The debates between characters are often convincing of several points of view. The walkaway world is not perfect, and the clumsy attempts at self policing were interesting parts of the book for me.

So those are the political idea how did the story work? Not great. I was into it for the first 150 pages. Then I found the prose to be confusing at times. The characters that were interesting early on got lost in the mix for me. I was thinking alot about the ideas suggested by the book so I enjoyed that but my eyes often rose up from the page and I found myself thinking about the setting and ideas losing desire to read on.

It is funny I didn't enjoy this book, but at the same time I think the ideas and issue it raises are important. I am glad Doctorow wrote it. Does that make sense? Not sure but that is how I feel.

[Akiva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Our post scarcity societies will not just look like Burning Man, but more boring and with 3D printers. We will not all speak in the tin-earned jargon of a breathless wired article. Our villains will not just be the mega-rich, or the woefully misguided, but the difficult parts of ourselves.

This book takes a lot from Burning Man and the ideas that inform it, but it misses the actual majesty of the burn: the glorious city rising out of stark nothing, the bustling and bubbling weirdness, the atavistic rush of the man burn, the temple's well of strength and sadness and hope, the serendipity brought on by urban density and shared civic spaces. He describes a bed and breakfast as a labor of love, a gift of hospitality and it resonates. But what's next door or down the street?

And it misses the artificiality, the hugs from strangers you'll never see again, the incredible environmental and economic cost, the reinvention of basic infrastructure, the unspoken hierarchies, the unsustainability of that level of engagement.

It is true that there are systems we should out opt-out from, ideas about society we should question. But we are likely to wrestle with the tyranny of structureless just as much as much as we wrestle with our current structure. We question our defaults not just to offer new ones, but for the habit of constant questioning and the continual invention it offers.

In Doctorow's world, everything good is immediately copied and iterated on, the sui generis soon becomes generic in an endless Darwinian ooze of remix culture. Here he has remixed some messy ideas into a sanitized package and offers characters brave enough to join utopia.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some really interesting themes in this book about the trajectory of the growing wealth gap, as well as the prospect of the 3d printing of basic needs (food/clothing/shelter) creating an environment of 'abundance' for those willing to 'walk away' from material wealth and privilege. But, there were a number of really clunky and distracting sex scenes. Not hot at all... I found myself skimming though them to get back to the story.

Definitely a strong Burning Man influence on Cory Doctorow. He *must* have gone, as the walkaway communities and social structures sound a lot like the platonic ideal of a typical well organized BM camp.

In some ways, it's a dystopian view of what could happen if Middle America continues to get hollowed out by a lack of jobs and the 0.01% continue their stratospheric accumulation of all capital, making wage slaves out of the rest of us. But, there's optimism/idealism in the the way people in the novel cope with the wealth hoarders, and realize that refusing to remain within that system how they exercise their real power.

[Shari · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book sadly came off preachy and awkward, and seemed to be a bit of a manifesto cloaked as a novel. A pass for me. I'm not one for sex scenes in books anyway, but the ones in this novel seemed unnecessary, didn't add to the story, and were written completely awkward and cringy as hell. This may be my last Doctorow, although I've enjoyed some of his books in the past.

The plot was about the whole "post-scarcity economy" and what would happen in the future if we could 3D print all the things and we lived as this communistic society where we didn't use money as a currency, but everyone worked to contribute. This effort was far more preachy manifesto than dystopian future.

[Bug · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 30%

I can't. I just can't.

I looked at the reviews and I wanted very much to like this book. I didn't want to be another person giving it a shit review. But I really didn't enjoy it. It was disjointed, pretentious and confusing. I see no point continuing, I have plenty of other books I'm looking forward to.

I just had a thought, am I too stupid to understand this book? Do I just not "get" it?

[Maddie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a mouthpiece for the extremely millenial ideals of the author. I found this book tremendously boring to read because of the repetitive plot, and almost put it down several times. The characters had no real distinguishing characteristics (other than sexual preferences). The plot was largely "group of rebels go to new location, are attacked by The Man, walk away to a new place." There were a few interesting paragraphs that I flagged, but overall, if an author wants their book to be a mouthpiece of their philosophy on life, they should have a more interesting philosophy.