Walkaway by Cory DoctorowMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I always enjoy reading near future sci-fi books and seeing which companies the author choses to mention. In the action of “Walkaway”, which takes place about 50 years in the future, I recall hearing (on the audiobook) Amazon (still delivering), Palantir, and Gazprom. That’s a prescient collection of names for a book published a year ago. And that collection of companies represents the future built into this book. Amazon represents the goods economy and the use of drones. In “Walkaway”, goods are created from processing plants that can be programmed to create things from clothes to furniture. The walkaways, those outside of society, spend a lot of time looking for material to repurpose in these processing units. Recycling is big in the future. The existence of drones, used for surveillance as well as for attack, defense, and propaganda, also is a large part of this story. Drones show up everywhere. Palantir represents the ability to use an almost unlimited data set and bandwidth to keep track of individuals and groups as they roam the earth. Many of the successes described by the “watchers” could only be accomplished through massive computation of many, many data feeds. Gazprom represents the oligarch. In the world of “Walkaway”, oligarchs rule. And as we learn, even within the oligarchies there are hierarchies.
The other aspect of society that really informs this novel is the open source and maker movements. In effect, this becomes an oligarch/government battle against the open source/maker folks. Doctorow turns in a fine story. I found it a bit long, but compact enough in characters that I could follow along. There is a lot of action, but there also are quite a few long monologues explaining each parties’ philosophy. At first, I found this a bit preachy, about half strength of “Atlas Shrugged”. This book reminded me of “Atlas Shrugged”, and I suspect the author intended this as his characters brought Ayn Rand up early on. It also felt a bit similar to another escape from society book that I’ve read recently, “The Mandibles”. These all have a “we can rebuild society better” vibe, and that seems quite popular now.
The audiobook employed a number of excellent narrators to tell the story, each assigned chapters based on the character that was the main subject of that chapter. This was one of the better uses of multiple voices, and it made this long story seem shorter. Enjoyable on reflection, but can be a bit of a slog as you go through the philosophizing and background setting.
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