Futuristic Book Club #1 | Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
Ticket price includes a beverage
Felix and American Book Center present: Book Club – an invitation to experience new worlds in order to understand our own.
Speculating on possible futures allows us to explore our values and challenge our assumptions, creating new visions for society. Sci fi creates a portal to begin addressing technological change, existential risks and cultural shifts that define the present and possible future.
As we are poised to enter a new era of the internet, a decentralized web3 featuring persistent, shared and virtual environments, let’s revisit visions of the metaverse from iconic authors to consider how we can shape what’s next.
Kick off the weekend right with the Futuristic Book Club in the cosy Felix Meritis appartement next to the main entrance. Tickets are 5 euro and include a complimentary drink. This first edition, we’re reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. RSVP and get your book at ABC. Make sure you finish the book before the Book Club – happy reading!
“Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle.”
―William Gibson
About ‘Walkaway’ by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow’s first adult novel in eight years: an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.
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 nowhere 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 SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.
Abi Sutherland | Host
Abi Sutherland is an American/Scottish woman living in the Netherlands for over fifteen years. She’s been a science fiction fan pretty much from birth, and a member and moderator online communities since the early 21st century. Both are important to her in these increasingly uncertain times, because although science fiction is the literature of previously unexplored possibilities, it’s community that can turn those possibilities into reality.
Abi works as an Information Architect at TomTom, and is a bookbinder in her spare time.