Walkaway

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.

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 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.

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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. :(