The Door Marked Exit

Most near-future novels are about a thing: a machine, a virus, a corporation. Walkaway is about a verb. The verb is "walk away", and the novel's argument is that it is the most dangerous thing a person can do to an economy.

Cory Doctorow published it in April 2017, through Tor in the US and Head of Zeus in the UK. The world it starts in is called Default. It is a near future damaged by climate change and pollution, watched everywhere, and run for the benefit of the very rich. For most people the work has gone, and what remains is something the book calls "non-work". Hubert, Etc. is a young man named for his long string of middle names. He and his friend Seth meet Natalie Redwater, who was born into the elite and has had enough of it. The three leave.

What they find is better than they expected, and much more difficult. Printers far better than the ones in any real shop make tools, clothes and shelter. Machines hunt through rubbish and break it down into raw material. Nobody needs money to eat. So more people come, and the walkaways begin to settle in abandoned districts and then whole abandoned cities. The rich respond as the rich do: with police, soldiers and mercenaries. Then the walkaways' laboratories turn up something the powerful can't leave alone, research that could end death, and the quarrel becomes a war.

The art: a manifesto with a pulse

The book's best ideas are social. Doctorow's walkaways don't have a leader, a creed or a budget. They have habits: cuddle puddles, chosen names, a disdain for tracking who has done how many hours. They argue constantly about whether a community may reward merit, and the book lets the argument stay unsettled. The ambition is to make a world where greed is not rewarded, and the novel's whole plot is the test of it.

Reviewers split in the way you'd predict. Strange Horizons thought it succeeded better as a manifesto than as a novel. I agree. People in Walkaway tend to stop in the middle of a crisis and explain the economics. The plot jumps forward in time, which lets Doctorow show consequences, but it also means we meet characters at the moment of a speech and leave before we've watched them live.

I think that's a fair price for a book this generous. It is among the few utopias that spends its length on the labour of making one, and it knows that abundance of things doesn't produce abundance of patience. It is warm, argumentative and cheerful in a way that near-future fiction rarely manages.

The weakness, then, is the architecture. The book wants to be an adventure, a love story and a seminar all at once, and the seminar usually wins. The antagonists are thinner than the walkaways. The finest thing in the book is a group of people with no authority trying to agree on rules. When the story turns to the war, it loses some of that.

The prophecy: the tools, the fear and the long shot

Doctorow makes three bets that matter.

The tools. The walkaways' world depends on fabrication cheap enough to make a settlement from rubble. Today's versions are real but nowhere near that. A robotics company, ICON, has printed nearly a hundred houses at Wolf Ranch in Georgetown, Texas, working with the builder Lennar, and they sell for about $450,000 to $600,000. That's a new way of building and a standard-priced house. It is not a free home. The distance between the printer in the novel and the printer in Texas is the distance between a tool and an economy: the walls can be printed, but the land, the permits and the profit margin stay where they were. Doctorow's tools are plausible. His claim that tools alone dissolve scarcity is the part that is a long way off.

The fear. The book imagines a world in which fewer people are needed and the ones who remain are nervous. This one is on its way, with a hedge. The IMF said in January 2024 that almost 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI, and about 60 per cent in rich countries. But a Yale Budget Lab study in October 2025 found no sign of economy-wide job loss in the first 33 months after ChatGPT's launch. Default's fear of becoming surplus is real today. Its world of mass non-work isn't here.

The long shot. The war starts over the end of death, and the real world has taken a first step. The biotech start-up Altos Labs launched in January 2022 with $3 billion, with Yuri Milner reported among its backers and Jeff Bezos rumoured to be one, to chase cellular "rejuvenation". Rich people are paying to live longer, which is the book's setup. But the novel's research is about the mind, and here reality is slow. In April 2025 researchers published the most detailed wiring map of a mammalian brain so far: one cubic millimetre of mouse cortex, around the size of a grain of sand, with some 200,000 cells and 523 million synapses. That is a small fraction of one mouse brain, let alone a human one. The ending of death is the novel's furthest bet, and it is the one I'd put the least money on.

What the book can't settle is who owns the tools. Printers are only as free as the designs and permissions behind them, and that, more than any army, decides whether leaving is possible.

The reading

Walkaway is a flawed, big-hearted and very useful book. As a novel it lectures. As prophecy it has the mood right (precarious work, a watched public, a rich minority that wants to be young for ever) and the technology plausible but premature. It is more careful about people than about printers, and that is the right way round. The best thing in it is the suggestion that exit is a form of voting, and that a society which makes leaving easy has to be worth staying in.

The book ends up asking one question that every decade of this century will be asked: when the old arrangement stops working for you, where is the door, and who is standing in it?