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Cory Doctorow: Walkaway (2017, Tor Books)

Walkaway is a 2017 science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Head of Zeus …

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'Goodreads'

I've enjoyed other Cory Doctorow books, Little Brother and Homeland both were good, the snippets for Walkaway had me hoping it would improve upon the area I didn't like in his previous books, which are the long explaining dialogues. Unfortunately Walkway doubles down on this format making it really difficult I abandoned all hope and stopped reading about 30% in.

The initial chapter was ok, but the main characters name "Hubert, Etc" is a bit awkward to read, and is so overused it's in practically every sentence. I almost stopped then it was quite annoying, but I was able to train myself to just start skipping over it.

There is a definite odd things going on with names, probably intentional, but makes it hard to read. There is a running "gag" with one character using the wrong name, ever single time, and it got called out and corrected every single time. It felt quite unnatural. A later chapter would be all pronouns and hard to figure out who's talking to who, especially with 4 people in the scene (2 men, 2 woman).

I feel that is the issue with the book, it just doesn't feel natural, the premise and world seem interesting but I couldn't continue with the writing. Such long sermons explaining everything, a simple question like why should I put this there, turns into 10 pages diving deep into social theories. Doctorow's other books had some of the same explaining, but the characters were developed a bit more and there was more story and plot.

I'm glad I bought it to support the author, his other two books I downloaded via open source, but the others I've read of his our much better.