In a world wrecked by climate change, in a society owned by the ultra-rich, in a city hollowed out by industrial flight, Hubert, etc, Seth and Natalie have nowhere else to be and nothing better to do.
But there is another way. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life โ food, clothing, shelter โ from a computer, there is little reason to toil within the system. So, like thousands of others in the mid-21st century, the three of them turn their back on the world of rules, jobs, the morning commute and... walkaway.
It's a dangerous world out there, the empty lands are lawless, hiding predators โ animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, the thousands become hundreds of thousands, building what threatens to beome a post-scarcity utopia. But then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. And now it's war โ a war that will turn the world upside down.
**
Review
"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
"Cory Doctorow has authored the Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunctfaculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture and 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
About the Author
Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author of nonfiction and award-winning science fiction. His science fiction has won numerous awards, and his young-adult novel Little Brother spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine , the Globe and Mail , the Boston Globe , Popular Science , and others. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing , and he was named one of the web's twenty-five "influencers" by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His novels have earned such awards as the Prometheus Award, the 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Locus Award for Best First Novel, Sunburst Award, White Pine Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He has served as Canadian regional director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.