I think I need to read more Cory Doctorow. I've only read one other of his works and that was because it was on the 2020 Canada Reads list. Radicalized was a collection of novellas which seemed almost too real to be fiction. This book is more fictiony (is that a word) but I thought it was brilliant.

When there is no work and you are under constant surveillance and most people live in megacities sometimes the only choice is to walk away. That's what Hubert Espinoza (known as Etcetera because he has 19 middle names), Natalie Redwater (who chooses the name Iceweasel) and Seth decide to do. There are a number of communities living in areas the privileged have abandoned and the trio join in one of them. These communities use the gift economy so that no one does without. They scavenge for things they need and use 3-D printers to make the rest. Supposedly no-one is in charge of the community and everyone works. When there are threats to the community the inhabitants will just choose to walkaway instead of fighting. Except the people in charge of Default don't like this ancillary system and they are especially concerned when a group of scientists discover how to do complete brain scans that mean people could have eternal life. (it's not that the superrich are opposed to the idea of everlasting life; in fact, they want it but they want it for themselves only) Natalie's father, part of the zottarich establishment, uses mercenaries to kidnap her and hold her captive. Iceweasel manages to get away and reunite with her lover only to face other attacks. Seth and Etcetera also find their own partners but the threesome have a strong friendship. Eventually the walkaway society gains an upper hand but there are lots of trials and tribulations.

From a review by Sean Gallegher in Ars Technica I learned that Walkaway is a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the author's debut novel. I'm going to have to get my hands on that book. In the meantime I have holds on a couple of audiobooks including Little Brother so that should keep me going. ( )

I read this as part of my ongoing exploration of life-extension technology sf for a class I am eventually going to teach. I know of Cory Doctorow, of course, as both an sf writer and a cultural critic, but I have never actually read anything by him before aside from a single short story in a Lou Anders Fast Forward collection, so I was curious to see what I thought. I picked up Walkaway because I had read it was, in part, about mind uploading, and specifically I was intrigued by what I had read, that "[p]art of the process is altering the simulation's mental state into something that will be psychologically okay with being a simulation of a dead person."

This idea is indeed intriguing; unfortunately, you have to read the whole rest of the book in order to read about it. This book starts out okay, but then you soon realize that it's a bunch of people giving other people lectures about what an ideal society looks like, repeat for over 350 pages. It's clearly in dialogue with Le Guin's The Dispossessed... it's clearly also so so inferior to The Dispossessed as a utopian text as to be insulting. I dragged myself through to the end of its relentless mediocrity out of some sense of obligation (it's more a series of novellas than a novel, and maybe I would find that one of them worked on its own in a teachable way), and it took me weeks to do it. The actual society is interesting; the characters and plot are not. The mind uploading thing is barely even a significant component of the book, and not really relevant thematically. Dull and rambling. I will not be teaching it!

Great premise, interesting story lines - occasionally tooooo much exposition coming out of character's mouths. Fast read! ( )

I've noticed that Doctorow has a tendency to get a little tech babble-y, and that combined with the way he plays with language can make him unappealing. But the meat of his story is so compelling, and what he writes are stories that NEED to be shared.

They are full of hope, and even if I don't necessarily agree with his philosophy, Cory addresses issues that are too close to reality to ignore.

I loved it, even when I didn't like it. ( )

Hard work at times but extraordinarily inventive and radical. Half the world walks away from all their possessions and lives sharing and the rich try very hard to stop them. ( )