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Walkaway

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Cory Doctorow's first adult novel in eight years is an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza―known to his friends as Hubert, Etc―was too old to be at that Communist party.

But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has nowhere left to be―except among the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. Falling in with Natalie, an ultrarich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society―and walk away.

After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life―food, clothing, shelter―from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system.

It's still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators, animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultrarich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it's war, a war that will turn the world upside down.

Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multigenerational SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years—and the very human people who will live their consequences.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 23, 2017
      Doctorow (Homeland) expects more patience for superfluous eccentricities than many readers may be able to provide in this unengaging novel set in 2071. For example, his opening sentence begins with the name of a character ultimately referred to as Hubert, Etc., whose full name is 22 names long because his parents decided, for no logical reason, to give him as his middle names the “top twenty names from the 1890 census.” There’s also awkward prose (“The beer was where the most insouciant adolescents congregated, merry and weird as tropical fishes”), odd phrases that sound clunky rather than plausibly futuristic (“authoritarian enclobberments”), and goofy aliases (Gizmo von Puddleducks, Zombie McDingleberry). Collectively, these authorial indulgences—along with underdeveloped world building and unmemorable characters— serve mainly to distance readers from his creative premise: a near-future where the rich are on the verge of achieving immortality, a development that one character fears spells the “end of morality,” and rebels, known as walkaways, attempt to create a functioning gift economy.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In Walkaway communities, individuals bring together their different talents and motivations to create something new and surprising. So using multiple narrators is the perfect way to tell this story. Each actor employs slightly different voicings, which reveal subtle interpretations of character. The performers lend variety to the long passages of dialogue in which characters discuss their visions of the society they're building. Production quality varies--it sounds as if multiple studio environments and recording equipment were employed, with different production engineers adjusting room tone and recording levels. But this characteristic invokes the cooperative Walkaway spirit. In other words, it doesn't detract too much from the uniformly energetic and passionate performances. D.L.Y. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

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