Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow, Enrique Maldonado Roldán (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788412620030
Publisher:	Capitán Swing Libros
Publication date:	03/20/2023
Series:	Ensayo
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	560
File size:	740 KB
Age Range:	17 Years
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Cory Doctorow is a co-editor of Boing Boing and a columnist for the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Locus. His award-winning novel Little Brother was a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher

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

Library Journal

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

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews