Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow Narrated by Alan Bochm

Overview

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza (conocido por sus amigos como Hubert, Etc) era demasiado viejo para estar en esa fiesta comunista. Pero después de ver el desmoronamiento de la sociedad moderna, no le queda otro sitio donde estar, excepto entre la escoria de jóvenes descontentos que se pasan la noche de fiesta y desprecian a las ovejas que ven por la mañana. Después de conocer a Natalie, una heredera muy rica que intenta escapar de las garras de su represivo padre, los dos deciden renunciar por completo a la sociedad formal y marcharse. Después de todo, ahora que cualquiera puede diseñar e imprimir las necesidades básicas de la vida -alimentación, ropa, refugio- desde un ordenador, parece que hay pocas razones para trabajar dentro del sistema. Sigue siendo un mundo peligroso, las tierras vacías destrozadas por el cambio climático, las ciudades muertas ahuecadas por la huida industrial, las sombras que esconden a los depredadores, tanto animales como humanos. Sin embargo, cuando los pioneros fugitivos prosperan, más gente se une a ellos. Entonces, los caminantes descubren lo único que los ultrarricos nunca han podido comprar: cómo vencer a la muerte. Ahora es la guerra, una guerra que pondrá el mundo patas arriba. Fascinante, conmovedor y con un humor negro, Walkaway es un thriller de ciencia ficción multigeneracional sobre los desgarradores cambios de los próximos cien años... y las personas muy humanas que vivirán sus consecuencias.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/23/2017
Doctorow (Homeland) expects more patience for superfluous eccentricities than many readers may be able to provide in this unengaging novel set in 2071. For example, his opening sentence begins with the name of a character ultimately referred to as Hubert, Etc., whose full name is 22 names long because his parents decided, for no logical reason, to give him as his middle names the “top twenty names from the 1890 census.” There’s also awkward prose (“The beer was where the most insouciant adolescents congregated, merry and weird as tropical fishes”), odd phrases that sound clunky rather than plausibly futuristic (“authoritarian enclobberments”), and goofy aliases (Gizmo von Puddleducks, Zombie McDingleberry). Collectively, these authorial indulgences—along with underdeveloped world building and unmemorable characters— serve mainly to distance readers from his creative premise: a near-future where the rich are on the verge of achieving immortality, a development that one character fears spells the “end of morality,” and rebels, known as walkaways, attempt to create a functioning gift economy. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Walkaway

“Is Doctorow’s fictional utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our own hands. A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we’ll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we’re going to have to fight for it.”—Edward Snowden

“The darker the hour, the better the moment for a rigorously-imagined utopian fiction. Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle. A wonderful novel: everything we’ve come to expect from Cory Doctorow and more.”—William Gibson

“The Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunctfaculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture...zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it.”—Neal Stephenson

“Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction writers, because he’s also a public intellectual in the old style: he brings the news and explains it, making clearer the confusions of our wild current moment. His fiction is always the heart of his work, and this is his best book yet, describing vividly the revolutionary beginnings of a new way of being. In a world full of easy dystopias, he writes the hard utopia, and what do you know, his utopia is both more thought-provoking and more fun.”—Kim Stanley Robinson

"Thrilling and unexpected....A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don’t already." Kirkus (starred review)

"Doctorow has envisioned a fascinating world...This intriguing take on a future that might be right around the corner is bound to please." —Library Journal

"Memorable and engaging. ...Ultimately suffused with hope." —Booklist

Library Journal

04/15/2017
In Doctorow's (Little Brother) near future, all our needs can easily and cheaply be satisfied with advances in computing and 3-D printing technology. But the gulf between rich and poor is getting larger, prompting the disaffected to "walk away" from society. Natalie, Seth, and Etcetera are three such walkaways, leaving Toronto with packs on their backs and a determination to find a better way to live. They meet up with other like-minded individuals who reside in communes, pooling knowledge and resources. The superrich they left behind are simply not willing to let walkaways exist, especially as their technological advances promise to defeat death itself. Doctorow has envisioned a fascinating world on the brink of post-scarcity. His characters philosophically muse on topics such as inequity, the nature of human consciousness, gender identity, and the idea of the greater good. But there is just enough action to leaven all that philosophy. VERDICT This intriguing take on a future that might be right around the corner is bound to please Doctorow's many fans. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]—MM

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

In Walkaway communities, individuals bring together their different talents and motivations to create something new and surprising. So using multiple narrators is the perfect way to tell this story. Each actor employs slightly different voicings, which reveal subtle interpretations of character. The performers lend variety to the long passages of dialogue in which characters discuss their visions of the society they’re building. Production quality varies—it sounds as if multiple studio environments and recording equipment were employed, with different production engineers adjusting room tone and recording levels. But this characteristic invokes the cooperative Walkaway spirit. In other words, it doesn’t detract too much from the uniformly energetic and passionate performances. D.L.Y. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-12-27
Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, 2014, etc.) offers a counterintuitive alternate (possible?) future in this gritty yet hopeful sci-fi epic.Inspired by Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Doctorow offers meticulous worldbuilding and philosophizing about how the world just around the corner might be. In an age of makers, 3-D printers, mobile fabricators, and endless food sources, the book asks what life would be like—or should be like—in a post-scarcity, post-employment world. The short answer is the rich have gotten insanely richer and everyone else has chucked it—walking away from society to live communally in environmentally gutted rural areas and dead cities. Our entry into this new societal framework is multinamed Hubert, known as Hubert, Etc., his pal Seth, and their new friend Natalie Redwater, the daughter of a member of the 1 percent. In the wilds of Canada, they fall in with a tech-savvy barkeep, Limpopo, who explains the precarious, money-less walkaway culture to the newbies: "In theory, it's bullshit. This stuff only works in practice." It's a world where identity, sexuality, and perception are all fluid, enlivened by fiercely intellectual debates and the eternal human collisions that draw people together. Visually and culturally, it's also a phantasmagorical scene with beer made from ditch water, tactical drone fleets, and the occasional zeppelin or mech—all technology that exists today. The tense situation escalates when the walkaways discover a way to scan and preserve consciousness online—if the body is gone, does perception remain? What threat might a tribe of immortal iconoclasts present to their capitalist overlords? Much of the novel focuses on Natalie (now "Iceweasel"), who is kidnapped by her father's mercenaries. Doctorow sticks the landing with a multigenerational saga that extends this tale of the "first days of a better nation" to a thrilling and unexpected finale. A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don't already.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159969392
Publisher:	BookaVivo
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Language:	Spanish

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