Like every utopian novel, Walkaway is a work of both future speculation and present-day critique. Doctorow’s portrait of Default and its ruling class of the “zottarich” – cynical and calculating types, luxuriating in slick condos, profiteering on climate chaos – is a mirror to the current regime of global finance. This is post-Great Recession fiction, drawing on Occupy Wall Street and other anti-austerity movements, with shoutouts to David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, always keeping capitalism and its cult of greed in the crosshairs…
…“There’s a reason walkaway stuff tends to be a building or two, a wasp’s nest wedged in a crack in default,” Iceweasel’s friend warns of their growing successes. “Anything over that scale goes from entertainingly weird to a threat they can burn in self-defense.” Her dire prediction comes true when walkaway scientists figure out how to simulate consciousness in a computer (Walkaway’s MacGuffin), leading immortality-obsessed zottarich to pummel the research facility. Abandoned Akron, now squatted by walkways, the homeless, and refugees – model of “a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners” – is next to pay the price.
The walkaway response is to take the same technologies that allow them to live independently of Default and turn them against Default. 3D printers fab field rations and medkits for upcoming skirmishes. Clever weapon designs are downloaded off the darknet. Salvage drones are deployed in ambushes on the cops. Walkaway is an exercise in imagining technology, cleaved from the framework of surveillance and profit, being put instead to liberatory use. Some accuse Doctorow of techno-utopianism, but his latest book seems to rest on a simple point: tech is what we make of it. A network can censor revolt or spur it…
…Faithful to its premise, Walkaway delivers a utopia born among complex, cascading disasters. Doctorow’s vision of revolutionary struggle, when all is said and done, is rather bloody. But that should not dissuade us from the novel’s call, its challenge, to get ourselves out from under capitalism. As walkways know, it’ll take more than outrage to put an end to the disaster we are living through. We’ll need legions of people ready to build and fight for a new world, with all the creativity and utopian spirit they can muster.
I am buying this and putting my other books aside.
I am almost done with this book, and I feel like this review completely misses the whole (beautiful) point of the walk away: there is no fighting back, weapon designs could be downloaded from the darknet but never actually used, even booby traps against Canadian Army/cops/contractor mercs are not deliberate but just accidental. When things get intolerable you just … walk away from whatever it is that they want and build something better.
Seeing that it was posted on Cory Doctorow’s own tumblr, however, I may have missed the point myself.
tinfoilparachute 