A review of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway

Forget cyberpunk and steampunk, Doctorow creates a new genre, dev-opsecpunk, spinning up a world where people fed up with the scarcity power play literally walkaway to create an abundant world from the leftovers, unwanted and over-resourced. Technology to manufacture nearly anything creates the latitude for such a leap and if the Default world could stand it, things just might work out. Inside is the story of pioneers inventing the “first days of a better nation” — rich characters — who capture your inner dissatisfaction, pull you into their world and make you believe in the human spirit. Walkaway doesn’t feel like a distant future, but a struggle we are perhaps engaged in already, offering a prescient road map to modern utopia, or perhaps more pragmatically, a hopeful dystopia.