Introduction
Societal turmoil, expanding the economic gap between the rich and the poor, and corrupt financial system – Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway offers an optimistic and dystopian vision of the near future, where technological advance brings salvation. This novel investigates issues of extreme economic inequality and of building a society in a situation where there is no choice but for people to walk away. In the book, the focal point consists of three persons’ fates who decide to join the walkway community. The protagonists get tired of the misery cast upon them by the fatality of capitalism and walk away to change the world using a 3D printer, which serves as an effective plotline.
Main body
When production reaches the stage when it can put an end to worldwide hunger and when the economic elite is greedy enough not to let it happen, then there will be riots. The super-rich class called “zottas” aggressively responds to them when more and more people decide to unite, that is by launching a military campaign against the walkaway communities. The writer is critical towards both camps – towards the antagonistic world of the economic elite and even to the oppressed majority.
The fate of a walkway that is not skilled in technology fields is pitiful, as every person in the community is supposed to apply their skills to the best of their abilities. Such a person is not estimated highly in a meritocratic society of walkaways since the main criterion in this type of societal structure is work efficacy. To my way of thinking, this is the main flaw of this type of society.
In Walkaway, the life of the communities is presented almost as a techno-utopia, based on the idea of destroying classist and economic inequality. Nevertheless, the majority of walkaways are people exceptionally versed in natural and exact sciences; in this way, they are those who are supposed to represent the upper-middle-class. The readers will not find among them people used to manual dirty work – in the walkaway community, there is no place for a cashier.
Consequently, the walkaways even find a way to stop death using 3D printing technologies by saving brain-wave patterns. This plotline serves as a pivot around which the action revolves. Even though Doctorow’s main focus in the novel is technology, a lot of joy from reading this novel comes from the cultural aspect of walkaway communities. Walkaway is full of references that are still untouched by popular culture – that is, in my opinion, the best part of the book.
The abundance of ideas in the novel to my mind is combined with some potentially weaker parts, for instance, its dialogues and speech, which sometimes feel stilted. It seems to me that characters in the book tend to speak robotically, creating an impression that someone forces them to do it – no matter the type of relations between them or the level of their emotional closeness. Since dialogical speech is an excellent source of characterization, the protagonists lack in their expressive abilities and do not seem fleshed out enough.
Accordingly, the ideas presented by Doctorow, although technologically advanced and meritocratic, in my opinion, lack basis because they are not supported by the emotional charge that could have given them additional emotive value. Consequently, the way I see it, the meritocratic ideas of the book are not well supported by how they are framed, thus taking away their efficiency.
Conclusion
Overall, I would call Walkaway an optimistically-pessimistic critique of modern capitalism through the prism of future social catastrophes. The novel is full of mockery; it targets every character: the writer does not spare even tech‑savvy ones, relentless meritocrats with no regard for the inherent value of being human. This Doctorow’s science fiction novel tries to find possible salvation in the social reformation conducted by tech-savvy people that leads to an immortal gamified post-scarcity society with drones mining raw materials.