Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
I read this as part of my ongoing exploration of life-extension technology sf for a class I am eventually going to teach. (As of the time I write this in October 2021, this class has finally been scheduled... for Spring 2024! I guess I have a lot of time to read prospective texts.) I know of Cory Doctorow, of course, as both an sf writer and a cultural critic, but I have never actually read anything by him before aside from a single short story in a Lou Anders Fast Forward collection, so I was curious to see what I thought. I picked up Walkaway because I had read it was, in part, about mind uploading, and specifically I was intrigued by what I had read, that "[p]art of the process is altering the simulation's mental state into something that will be psychologically okay with being a simulation of a dead person."
This idea is indeed intriguing; unfortunately, you have to read the whole rest of the book in order to read about it. This book starts out okay, but then you soon realize that it's a bunch of people giving other people lectures about what an ideal society looks like, repeat for over 350 pages. It's clearly in dialogue with Le Guin's
The Dispossessed... it's clearly also so so inferior to
The Dispossessed as a utopian text as to be insulting. I dragged myself through to the end of its relentless mediocrity out of some sense of obligation (it's more a series of novellas than a novel, and maybe I would find that one of them worked on its own in a teachable way), and it took me weeks to do it. The actual society is interesting; the characters and a plot are not. The mind uploading thing is barely even a significant component of the book, and not really relevant thematically. Dull and rambling. I will not be teaching it!
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