Not A Book Club Review – Walkaway
The last few months I’ve had some time to read a few books outside of book club (*gasp!*), and I’ve decided I might as well post a few thoughts about them. They aren’t full book club reviews, but they’re something.
Synopsis: A society on the edge of breaking into both post-scarcity and transhumanism suffers intense adjustment shocks.
This is an intensely interesting look at the border state of a capitalist society turning into a post-scarcity one, and the potential conflict that could engender as people struggle to make the switch. One might not think it’d be that hard to switch to not laboring for anything once machines can do it, but the values of the work ethic and earning one’s keep can be really hard to transmute into something that doesn’t judge people for not working. The portrayal of a society struggling between such fundamentally opposed ideologies is very compelling, and that alone would be enough to entice me. But on top of all that, the human race starts dipping its toes into transhumanism here, struggling to create/stabilize the first uploaded humans, and that parallel storyline is fascinating as well, if perhaps not as integral to the plot.
Ultimately, this is an idea-novel. It has a lot of big ideas it wants to talk about, and it wraps those within an interesting storyline about rebellion and growth. The story works well enough, but it’s not the main attraction, and I could tell that in the reading. There are many occasions where characters monologue or dialog about ethics or economics (and usually both). It’s basically transhumanist punk message fic. Which is fine with me, I enjoy message fic! :) I really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, and The Golden Compass, and several of John C Wright works, and so on. I consider message fic to be both fun, inspiring, and motivational, even when I disagree with the message! Assuming that it’s well done message fic. Walkaway isn’t as well done as the ones I’ve named, but it’s still pretty darn good. Recommended.
As a note, this book is heavily inspired by the post-scarcity community at Burning Man. Doctorow attends at least sometimes (I got the book from him there in 2017, when he gave me an audio version on USB), and if you’ve been before you’ll recognize a lot of the ethos, as well as great heaps of the jargon! It provided me with a sense of familiarity. Although it also meant I was constantly visualizing everyone in the Nevada desert rather than the Canada wilds. At least, up until the blizzards became a plot point.
