Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

The science fiction author, activist, blogger, journalist and Cory Doctorow is the award-winning author of the novels Walkaway, Makers, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as well as the adult novels Little Brother, Homeland, and Pirate Cinema, plus numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. The co-founder of the influential blog Boing Boing, Doctorow is one of the most fascinating thinkers on the question of how technology and society shape each other. Putting humor in service of deeply humane ideas, Doctorow’s fiction feels like a conversation with a highly unpredictable but perennially lucid visitor from tomorrow. In this episode Joel Cunningham talks with Cory Doctorow at this summer’s San Diego Comic Con.

”Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle.” —William Gibson

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza—known to his friends as Hubert, Etc—was too old to be at that Communist party.

But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society—and walk away.

After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system.

It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down.

Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation science fiction thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.

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Author photo of Cory Doctorow by Jonathan Worth