Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Walkaway: A Novel by Cory Doctorow --- 379 pages

In an article in Wired cited below, Cory Doctorow talks about why his new novel is utopian not dystopian.

"The difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails."

Walkaway is the story of the first days of a better nation, and the journey to get there.

You either love Doctorow or you shake your head in bafflement. I love his stuff, and the reviewer in steemit made two key connections that helped me understand why: he connects Walkaway with Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, one of the very first science fiction books I read in my early teens. Granted, Heinlein was a bona fide sexist pig: he's also one of the Holy Trinity of postwar American science fiction writers, along with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. He also makes the connection between Doctorow's "walkaway" and another one of my all time favorites, Ursula K. LeGuin's short story, "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas." If Heinlein is part of the Holy Trinity, LeGuin is the Mother Goddess of 20th century American speculative fiction. Maybe that makes Doctorow some kind of 21st century John the Baptist, preparing the way?

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from NPR.

Click HERE to read Doctorow's essay, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias" in Wired.

Click HERE to read the review on steemit.com.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free by Cory Doctorow

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow --- 162 pages

Science fiction author, journalist, blogger and Internet activist Cory Doctorow has promulgated his Three Laws for the Internet Age:

First Law: "Any Time Someone Puts a Lock on Something That Belongs to You and Won't Give You the Key, That Lock Isn't There for Your Benefit."

Second Law:  "Fame Won't Make You Rich, But You Can't Get Paid Without It."

Third Law: "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, People Do."

In this book, in his own inimitable fashion, Doctorow presents his arguments for the benefits of a free and open digital culture.

Click HERE to read the Boston Globe review of the book.

Click HERE to listen to an interview with Cory Doctorow on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross --- 349 pages

Doctorow and Stross have created the 21st century successor to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. Millions of posthumans have migrated off-planet to upload their consciousness into the Cloud, abandoning their meatbodies and playing mind games with their meatheaded cousins who stayed behind by spamming Earth's networks with disruptive technologies just for the fun of watching us squirm.

A highminded species would ignore these provocations but whoever said we as a species are all that highminded? No, there's a chump born every minute as they say, and this particular chump, a technophobic Welsh person named Huw, has been assigned the unenviable task of defending all humanity's continued right to exist before the Galactic Federation.