Cory Doctorow’ new book, Walkaway, is about a new generation of drop outs in the not-too-distant dystopian future, who, as reviewer Jason Sheehan put it,
Where the creative and the capable — and the lost — are walking into the wilderness to build a new world.
Very interesting. Sheehan digs in:
His novels read less like speculation than prediction — a hardcore nerd’s careful read on technology and biology and entropy, impeccably sourced and, in their own way, as real and present and hopeful as the augury of a Bizarro World Cassandra with carpal tunnel and grease under her nails.
Walkaway is his newest, and it is remarkable. It’s one of those books that I don’t want to describe at all, because doing so would ruin the new car smell of stepping into a fresh-off-the-lot universe. It would sour the joy of getting face-punched over and over again by the utopian/dystopian ideas, theories, arguments and philosophies that Doctorow lays down. It would, in short, wreck the fun.
[…]
Doctorow’s world is one where most people live in “Default” — as in the default reality of cities, bills, jobs, whatever. But in between these spirit-crushing bastions of old thought and old rules are a million miles of everything else. Fields. Wildflowers. Entire abandoned cities left to rot. And in Doctorow’s fantasy, it is into these spaces that all the world’s smart people and capable people and pissed-off people have gone.
“The point of Walkaway is the first days of a better nation,” says one of Doctorow’s characters. Says many of them, actually. That’s the recurring belief-system on which the book runs. It is the story of precisely this — what comes after the slow-burn apocalypse we all secretly fear is coming, how it will work, how it will all go wrong and how it will get made right again with drones, wet printers and elbow grease. It’s like the Genesis story of a world not yet here, but maybe dangerously close. After the flood, this is how we rebuilt …
Ok. I’m down.
This reminds me of one of the scenarios I’ve explore regarding future joblessness if we allow a world in which AI ephemeralizes work for nearly everyone. Since so much of what we need will drop precipitously in cost – since low-cost and enormously productive robots and AI will be filling the role in all supply chains, people will be able to ‘walkaway’, and recolonize exurban space. With a handful of low-cost robots, an individual or group could start a farm, grow food, herd animals, make yogurt, weave cloth, cure leather, bake bread… all with solar power, open source robots, and a small loan from a mutual aid society.
I’m also reminded of Bruce Sterling’s line:
The frontier of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.
Great reviews like this is why the book has such a massive hold list at the library 🙂
Might actually have to buy it.
Jason Sheehan, In ‘Walkaway,’ A Blueprint For A New, Weird (But Better) World
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