COME TOGETHER

Cory Doctorow tells us not to worry – we’re not all doomed...

When the old system collapses, suggests one of fiction’s recurring narratives, things get bad. In the words of Cory Doctorow, “The normal narrative convention is that when the lights go out, it’s a small band of decent people posed against the slavering hordes of people who have just been waiting for the first sign of disorder to come and, y’know, eat their neighbours.”

It’s a scenario Doctorow rejects in Walkaway, a novel about “the first days of the collapse of the old system”. The book was heavily influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell, which contrasts what we retrospectively think we know about disasters, that chaos ensues, with the reality of accounts that suggest those caught up in terrible events often behave very well.

It follows characters who literally get up and go, leave behind existence in a kind of hollow, supercharged neoliberal system, and instead try to figure out new ways to live. “It’s a kind of anti-‘prepper’ novel,” says Doctorow. “It’s a novel about prepping to help your neighbours, not prepping to get away from them.”

Walkaway is published by Head of Zeus.