“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun?”

“Walkaway” by Cory Doctorow is a novel that is as relevant as it is technologically dazzling.

If you’re a tech kind of person, you will thoroughly enjoy this book, coming as it does from a person (Cory Doctorow) who has a strong background in computer science. Having a familiarity with computers does not necessarily mean of course that this is directly related to technology generally, but it certainly seems to have some correlation, in particular with how digital systems work within a network within the novel. The novel also features mounds upon mounds of marvelous technologies, some of which are not yet realized, though they are nonetheless plausible.

If, like me, you are not particularly a tech person, never fear, because the book has other facets that are just as enthralling. For me, the best part was the insight it offered into the society that it presents.

“Walkaway” features a society that is plagued by intense conflict between extremely rich people and, of course, extremely poor people (as you cannot have one without the other). That is the simplest presentation that I can give of the dynamic in the novel, and it is certainly much more complicated than simple disparity or inequality, because as with real life, it is not a matter of just having more or less money, but it is the purchasing power that money gives one, and the kind of access it affords some while limiting others that becomes a problem, which complicates the issue into something further.

In this society, groups of people who decide that they do not want to be a part of the system involving the ultra-rich exploiting and perpetuating the status of the ultra-poor make the decision to walk away and form their own society apart from that.

They decide to live by principles of sharing and caring for one another, and though that concept by now perhaps a dead horse, in theory, I believe the novel offers a persuasive model of how something like this could function, despite imperfect qualities of human nature (like greed and selfishness).

One of the characters proffers her personal “walkaway” philosophy, which is that “the stories you tell come true. If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life”.

This ties into another mindset that the walkaways have, which is basically that one should hope even if it means that most of the time those hopes could and probably will be dashed because everyone who has accomplished anything is just someone who hoped and whose hopes were not dashed.

It is an optimistic novel and it is also realistic, both in its presentation and its philosophy. While the style of the novel may not be for everyone, the ideas within are certainly worth thinking about, and I recommend the read.