Science fiction has long served as a platform for the hashing out of big social, political, and economic issues, either metaphorically or literally. Cory Doctorow has never been shy of speaking their names directly, whether examining the implications of the surveillance state or the shifting of social and economic forces caused by technology. In his first novel for an adult audience in eight years, Doctorow revisits many of the themes he's written about in the past, and he refines them into a compelling, cerebral "hard" science fiction narrative of a not-too-distant future that ranks with some of the best of the genre.

Walkaway (from Tor Books, which releases on April 25 in hardcover) is a very Doctorow-y book. Intensely smart and tech-heavy, it still manages to maintain the focus on its human (or in some cases, post-human) protagonists. Walkaway is also full of big ideas about both the future and our current condition, and it has enough philosophical, social, and political commentary lurking just below the surface to fuel multiple graduate theses.

At its heart, Walkaway is an optimistic disaster novel—"in as much as it's a book about people who, in the face of disaster, don't disintegrate into CHUDs but instead jump right into the fray to figure out how they can help each other," Doctorow explained to Ars. "That, to me, is the uplifting part—it's not a question of whether bad things will happen or won't happen, but what we'll do when disaster strikes."

This is no Roland Emmerich script. The natural disasters have already unfolded before Walkaway begins, so you won't get an epic scene of New York being smashed by a climate change-induced glacier or tsunami. But there are some other, much more man-made disasters that follow—conflicts that are echoes of many currently unfolding in our own very real present. Considering Doctorow's other recent works, including his young-adult focused Little Brother, the political payload should not come as a surprise.

Revisionist future history

While it stands completely on its own, Walkaway is essentially a prequel to Doctorow's debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom—"like, explicitly," Doctorow admitted when asked about the thematic connections. The world of Down and Out is a post-scarcity far future where people can back themselves up in case of death or even exist as purely digital constructs. Its economy is based entirely on social reputation.

"In some ways, I thought of Walkaway as being set n-hundred years before Down and Out," Doctorow explained. "One of the things I did before writing it was to take a copy of Down and Out and read it and mark it up with stuff that I wanted to revisit, that I wanted to rethink, that I didn't necessarily agree with anymore, or look at implications of ideas that I hadn't thought of when I wrote it."

Another source for the thinking behind Walkaway was historian and activist Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell. Solnit's book is a study of the experiences of people who lived through actual disasters, and she also contrasts those experiences with how those disasters were covered by reporters and how the establishment responded to them.

Walkaway is set in a world where climate change-fueled disasters, wealth disparities, and economic displacement have unwound into what would be hard to mistake for a utopia. National borders and political structures have been rendered largely moot by the scale of ecological disaster, and billions have been uprooted from their homes. The disparity between how the world's elites and the masses deal with such large-scale disaster is the source of the conflicts that propel the novel.

The mega-wealthy have fixed things for themselves by moving into fortified homes on high ground (and hiring private security armies to keep everyone else out). The masses are left to hustle for the dregs of what's left in the ultimate dystopian version of the "gig" economy. Yet technology—created under the aegis of the United Nations to help the displaced—has made "printing" all of life's basic necessities possible. Scrambling for the scraps left by the wealthy is increasingly unattractive.

The open source hardware and software capable of converting the wreckage and waste of the old world into the essentials for a new one has been hacked and enhanced to go far beyond that. Those enhancements have inspired an increasing number of people to walk away from "the default." They become post-scarcity pioneers who are creating a new world where intellectual and physical property rights have no hold.

Free as in free beer vs. Free as in Freedom

If you've spent any time involved in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) wars, many of the themes and social dynamics within Walkaway will feel very familiar. Picture an emerging society imagined by Richard Stallman acolytes and GitHubbers, where everything (including the social structure) can be hacked, forked, merged, and reforked. You're pretty close to Doctorow's walkaway culture. The very language of the open source world is woven into Walkaway, with ad-hoc communities led by code committers and patchers. And one of the protagonists, introduced as Natalie, takes on the name "Iceweasel"—an homage to the Debian GNU/Linux FOSS version of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

On the other side, the wealthy elite are all about intellectual property and the supply chain, even when there's no one left at the consuming end. A villain asks the question, "What's more important, human rights or property rights?"

Walkaway opens with the protagonists at a "communist party"—a rave, of sorts, in an abandoned, automated furniture factory in Ontario. Instantly fabricated drugs, shareware live-culture beer, and illicitly manufactured furniture are all "free as in free beer." It's party culture as if lived on pirated copies of Windows XP and SourceForge downloads.

Hubert, Etc. (so dubbed because of his 19 middle names) and his friend Seth are in their late 20s. They're really too old for the scene, but they have nothing better to do with their post-collapse slacker lives. They meet Natalie (soon to be Iceweasel), an heiress from a super-rich family, and as the party falls apart in dramatic fashion, they end up back at her father's home. There, the three decide to ditch the "default reality" of what remains of the status quo and join those who have already walked away.

As the book progresses, the conflict between the walkaway world and the establishment controlled by wealthy elites grows. That conflict is driven largely by the success of the ultimate open source software project: the uploading of the human consciousness. Individuals "backed up" to the Walkaway cloud can defeat death, albeit as digital beings. And the wealthy, who have sought all manner of ways to extend their lives, want that technology exclusively for themselves.

Forking the future

Doctorow doesn't just touch on some of the ideas from Down and Out—in some cases, he savagely tears them apart, as we noted in our conversation. One of those concepts in Walkaway is a jab at a group within the "reputation economy cult"—a not-so-subtle dig at both Down and Out's economic model and some readers who may have taken it a bit too seriously. Doctorow explained:

I had always thought of Down and Out as an ambiguous utopia. But I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people who read it and have said, "I'd like to try to implement the reputation economy, and... I'm trying to figure out what people really feel, to disambiguate that—how do I do it?" That's why it's science fiction. Because those are the elements that make it a thought experiment, the parts that are... kind of metaphoric, or read as analogy. "Assume you can do these obviously impossible things—what would fall out of it?" It's a sort of science fictional mindgame—if something that we knew to be impossible were true, what would fall out of that? And then that allows us to think about what more stripped-down versions of that might be possible in a more imperfect world where the condition can't be realized but some pale shadow of it could be. That's science fiction's signature move—magnifying the otherwise blatant and low-level effects of technology into gross phenomena that can be used as a kind of a starting point or a straw man for debate about how we want to use that technology and where we should use it.

Walkaway plays that signature move to the hilt. It shows us a world trying to make things right after having made all the wrong decisions about how to use technology. But Walkaway executes that move beautifully. And like all great performances, it's worth witnessing over and over again.