My Walkaway book-tour is basically over, but I’m taking a little victory lap tonight at my local library, the Buena Vista Branch of the Burbank Public Library. Hope to see you there!
Dragon Con’s Dragon Award ballot was just published and I’m delighted to learn that my novel Walkaway is a finalist in the “Best Apocalyptic Novel” category, along with Daniel Humphreys’ A Place Outside the Wild, Omar El Akkad’s American War, Declan Finn and Allan Yoskowitz’s Codename: Unsub, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, Rick Heinz’s The Seventh Age: Dawn, and J.F. Holmes’s ZK: Falling.
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I’m on the latest episode of Innovation Hub (MP3):
Science-fiction is a genre that imagines the future. It doesn’t necessarily predict the future (after all, where are flying cars?), but it grapples with the technological and societal changes happening today to better understand our world and where it’s heading.
So, what does it mean when so much of our most popular science-fiction – The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Hunger Games – present bleak, depressing futures? Cory Doctorow might just have an answer. He’s a blogger, writer, activist, and author of the new book Walkaway, an optimistic disaster novel.
Three Takeaways
* Doctorow thinks that science-fiction can give people “ideas for what to do if the future turns out in different ways.” Like how William Gibson’s Neuromancer didn’t just predict the internet, it predicted the intermingling of corporations and the state.
* When you have story after story about how people turn on each other after disaster, Doctorow believes it gives us the largely false impression that people act like jerks in crises. When in fact, people usually rise to the occasion.
* With Walkaway, his “optimistic” disaster novel, Doctorow wanted to present a new narrative about resolving differences between people who are mostly on the same side.
Adapted by Josh Costello from the novel by Cory Doctorow
September 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 2017
Directed by Ryan Whitfield and Jason Green
SYNOPSIS
While skipping school and playing an alternate reality game, San Francisco teenager Marcus Yallow ends up in the middle of a terrorist attack and on the wrong side of the Department of Homeland Security. This play asks “What is the right thing to do when authorities become oppressors?”
CAST
LITTLE BROTHER CAST LIST
Marcus – Jeffrey Oakley
Ange – Kayley Shettles
Jolu – Yusuf Richardson
Daryl – Jack Clay
ENSEMBLE
Severe Haircut – Madison McMichael
Benson/Sutherland – Robert Gatlin
Guard – Essence Robinson
Mom – Isabelle Marchese
Dad – Max Green
Turk/CHP Officer – Braden Hammock
Ms. Galvez – Anais Moore
Charles – Elijah White
Police Officer 1 – Kyndall Jackson
Police Officer 2- Mia Simone Parker
Trudy Doo – Emily Shull
NPR Announcer – Allison Boggs
Concertgoer – Rachel Worthington
Reporter – Hannah Livingston
Fox Commentator – Katie Rasure
BBC Reporter – Olivia Ward
Pirate Queen – Abigail Harris
On stage light/sound/projection tech – Trenton Gorman, Claire Green
TICKETS & TIMES
$16— Adults
$12— Students & Seniors
Thursday, Friday and Saturday night curtain time is 7:30 pm.
Sunday afternoon curtain time is 2:30 pm.
The Box Office and the theater open one (1) hour prior to curtain.
The House opens 30 minutes prior to curtain.
Please arrive promptly. There will be no late admission.
There are three more stops on my tour for Walkaway: tomorrow at San Diego Comic-Con, next weekend at Defcon 25 in Las Vegas, and August 10th at the Burbank Public Library.
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Walkaway is my first novel for adults since 2009 and I had extremely high hopes (and not a little anxiety) for it as it entered the world, back in April. Since then, I’ve been gratified by the kind words of many of my literary heroes, from William Gibson to Bruce Sterling to the kind cover quotes from Edward Snowden, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson.
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I’m teaching the Clarion Science Fiction writing workshop at UCSD in La Jolla this week, and tomorrow night at 7PM, I’ll be reading from my novel Walkaway at Comickaze Liberty Station, 2750 Historic Decatur Rd #101, San Diego, CA 92106. Hope to see you!
‘‘Walkaway is an ‘optimistic disaster novel.’ It’s about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains aren’t the people next door, who’ve secretly been waiting for civilization’s breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.
‘‘In Walkaway, the economy has comprehensively broken down, and so has the planet. Climate refugees drift in huge, unstoppable numbers from place to place, seeking refuge. The world has no jobs for most people, because when robots do all the work, the forces of capital require a few foremen to boss the robots, and a few unemployed people mooching around the factory gates to threaten the supervisors with if they demand higher wages. Everyone else is surplus to requirements.
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Of all the press-stops I did on my tour for my novel Walkaway, I was most excited about my discussion with Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, where I knew I would have a challenging and meaty conversation with someone who was fully conversant with the political, technological and social questions the book raised.
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My latest Locus column is “Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before,” and it’s about science fiction’s addiction to certain harmful fallacies, like the idea that you can sideline the actual capabilities and constraints of computers in order to advance the plot of a thriller.
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