Walkaway

Alright, calling it. 2.5 stars, and DNF @ 37%.

I was really excited to read this, since Cory Doctorow is one of my lifestyle gurus (I do what he says!) and I really loved Little Brother (his (best?) YA novel covering similar themes) and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (his breakout novel). At best, when I read his books, I feel super inspired: I love the tech, I love the cyberpunk maker vision, I love the civil liberty righteousness. At worst, it feels pedantic and preachy. Unfortunately, this book is mostly the latter.

This book - his first adult novel in a long while - is kind of a prequel to Down and Out: it's a zero-days story of the birth of Cory's Burning Man-style utopian vision. It's divided into parts, and I made it through three:

1. the near future corporate dystopia featuring privileged, idealistic crusty-punks hosting “Communist parties” at abandoned Muji (!) factories
2. our heroes becoming “Walkaways”, who wander away from mainstream (“default”) society and go off-the-grid, well, sorta off-the-grid - they go onto the anarcho-commune maker grid.
3. the birth of a post-human future, where mad Walkaway scientists finally figure out how to upload consciousnesses into the cloud (specifically, as torrent files! HAHA), therefore obliterating death. Also, the birth of “adhocracy”, as featured in Down and Out.

And I stopped there.

So I stopped because this suffered from what a lot (most? all?) truly utopian novels suffer from: they're JUST a stream of explanations of how the utopia works. No real investment in the plot or characters. Dialogue doesn't happen, Socratic soap-boxing does. Characters are caricatures; the Skeptic, the True Believer, blah blah. The plot is just watching the utopia click into place.

Honestly, I haaaated the first part, because the three heroes - Hubert, Etcetera (he has lots of middle names; this joke gets old fast...), Natalie, and Seth - were nails-on-the-chalkboard unlikable. I also hated the narrative voice: completely unchallenged in its self-righteous more-radical-than-thou tone. I hated the Straw Man 1%-er introduced (Natalie's dad), and how completely unambiguous and boring it all was. I even found myself siding with billionaire dad, cuz, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, he JUST invited them to his house and they (metaphorically) took a giant dump in it cuz he's an “evil rich dude”! Talk about self-righteous brats, oof.

I liked the second and third parts more, just cuz the ideas were pretty fun: I loved the second part's idea of “open source” civil engineering; where anyone and everyone can just fork the repos of open source UNHCR housing projects, and people have big commit-revert wars. This was VERY funny, though I suspect it may not strike the same chord if you don't use GitHub/GitLab at work.

But, as things progressed, and I started hoping the original heroes would just die, I was like, maybe I should just DNF this. Like, these characters literally have no other driving interest other than explaining radical politics to each other (which is the only thing they talk about) and sex (which is the only thing they do, apart from making). It started to feel like this, only in earnest.

SOOO. I read the Bruce Sterling review of this and was annoyed by it: he calls it the “best Cory Doctorow book ever”, but then notes that it's written mechanically, has way too many sex scenes, has lectures instead of dialogues, and has “all kinds of basic plot and structural problems”. SO HOW IS IT THE BEST!? Also, this quote REALLY turned me off:

A political agita­tor needs to watch it with the self-congratulatory too-cleverness, because that gets all Mensa and it intimidates the normals. Doctorow's got that problem in spades, because he's got an IQ high enough to boil water.

DNF.

Maybe I shouldn't count this as “read” but I got about 70 pages in, and I've read books shorter than 70 pages so, what the hell?

It's not for me. I lived through the internet lingo of 2009 once and I don't need to do it again. It has a lot of “clever” quips but none are enjoyable for me. I also find it very preachy and it violates my “make your social commentary not be tweet shaped” rule.

I wanted to like this book: An exploration of utopian societies, the singularity, reincarnation via simulation, AI, the ingenuity of people; even stickin' it to The Man . . . It had the makings of a great novel but ended up being bogged down by its own ideology, overly clever slang and jargon that makes it almost impenetrable (and I am a techno-dork!), and characters archetypes that were far FAR too stereotypical and impossible to truly identify with. It didn't help that all the characters went by nicknames that obliterated their individuality. All of them. It made them semi-anonymous and difficult to envision.

This book is just too much of too much. I wanted to DNF it, but . . . I don't DNF books. I pushed through. An aggressive editor who knew how to say “No” probably could have saved it from itself.

Ugh. Again, I really wanted to like this book and it pains me to write this review. It's a book signed by the author no less. A guy I greatly admire and follow like a fanboy. Alas, this is not a book I can recommend. Sorry, Cory.

...

Hey! In reading the reviews, there are people who seem to like it. So, the audience is out there. That audience simply doesn't include me. :(

Interesting premises, but there was so much stopping for people to get on their soapboxes that I got fed up.

This story imagines a near future when there is a greater disparity between the very rich, and everyone else. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and recycling with magic ‘fabber' printers have put most people out of work. A growing number of the debt-ridden poor decide to walk away from civilization and live on the fringe of society. Their lifestyle is only possible to the highly improbable technological advances that enable them to print just about anything they need by recycling junk they can scrounge up. For some reason, these refugees decide to gather in what I'd call ‘pacifist hippie communes' - where people only do what they choose to do, including recreational drugs and non-hetero, casual sex.

I feel like this is more of a discussion on how the author idealizes future society than a character-driven story. I'd have listened to the TED talk, but I can't recommend picking up this book.

This book veered into being more of a way of working out a political argument on paper than a work of fiction per se, and was a little cloyingly clever at times (which, to be fair, is kind of Doctorow's thing). I also don't know whether I want to critique it for being overly idealistic or myself for being too cynical to believe in its utopia. As with all transhumanist fairy tales, I know that I want to believe it too much to really have a rational opinion of it. But it may have convinced me to go to Burning Man?

This book was interesting and in a vein with Doctorow's philosophy and body of work. I picked it up when he was speaking at my FLBS, and he referred to it as his novel about abundance, about what we would do if there was enough for everyone. The setting is a world were the very rich control the world, abandoning people, places, and things the moment they cease to be profitable. Other people pick up othose things and through miraculous advances in 3D printing, are able to live quite comfortable. They walk away from society and live without norms of ownership.

Oh, and with their unlimited time and research materials, walkaways “cure” death.

Parts of the book were hard to get into (Doctorow is very smart and occasionally gets really into the nitty gritty which I could take or leave, but the characters are interesting and include complex portrayals of trans and bisexual (male and female) characters from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It's a utopia of sex, drugs, and simulated human bots. While the concept is a bit hard for me to see as a viable future, it is a cool thought experiment and definitely worth the read.

Reading Doctorow always makes me want to overthrow global capitalism by installing Linux and learning to code.