Is Walkaway a prequel to Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom? It seems like a similar universe. The most dystopian thing you can imagine is that, but for the thin veneer of civilization, it would be a bloodbath. Do people pitch in and rise to the occasion? Or do they turn on their neighbors and eat them? That's the dystopian vision. So for me, the thing that cleaves a utopia from a dystopia is what Rebecca Solnit says cleaves a disaster from a catastrophe: It's what we do when things go wrong. But really it's a very hard job to write a dramatic novel-especially in the kind of pulpy science fiction tradition-in which things aren't going wrong. We tend to think of books in which things are in crisis as being dystopian novels. Is this a dystopia in Walkaway, or a utopia?ĭoctorow: I think that we mistake the furniture for the theme. It's a word no one knew 10 years ago and now everyone says all the time about pretty much every novel ever. Reason: Let's talk about the word dystopia. These little flourishes bring readers a few inches closer to Doctorow's subversive worldview, where it's always possible, even admirable, to thumb your nose at the rules imposed by governments, tech companies, and just about everyone else.
Hardcover review copies also shipped with a similarly sized multitool. office in April, he handed out credit card–shaped USB drives loaded with the audiobook on his way out the door. The downside is that standard providers like Audible won't carry it.
All versions of the novel are free from distribution-restricting DRM protections. The Walkaway audiobook is a particular delight, featuring guest appearances from a ramshackle celebrity cast, including Amber Benson, Justine Eyre, Amanda Palmer, and Wil Wheaton. And, as usual, they're just heterodox enough to provide moments of delightful confirmation bias and squirm-inducing challenge for readers of nearly every ideological stripe.ĭoctorow, a civil libertarian who identifies with the political left, has staked out a broad and eccentric territory for his fiction and nonfiction beats, covering topics from privacy to drones to Digital Rights Management (DRM) to open-source software creation. A fascinating cadre of John Galt–style opters-out form the core of the new novel, but the story is concept-driven, not character-driven.Īs usual, Doctorow's politics permeate his writing. His new novel, Walkaway (Tor), circles back to the theme of his first novel, 2003's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: the question of what a post-scarcity world might look like. Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fame, has returned to adult fiction after a long stint in the young adult hinterlands ( Little Brother, Homeland).
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