Dystopia Now! at Birkbeck

On May 26th 2017, I'll be presenting a paper on Cory Doctorow's new "utopian disaster" novel, Walkaway. This conference comes at a good time as I'll be interviewing Doctorow in Liverpool the day before, and so I'll have the opportunity to talk about a work that, in more ways that one, is right at the cusp of the "Now."

Click here for the link to Birkbeck University's event page.

Here's the proposal for my paper:

Dystopia and Utopia at the Cusp in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway: A Novel

Described as a utopian disaster novel, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) explores the possibility of establishing a utopia in a post-scarcity world where the widening gap between the wealthy and poor threatens to lead to a speciation of humanity into elite transhumans and climate refugees who function simply as surplus resources. Doctorow writes that ‘[t]he difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in’ (“Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias,” Wired, 2017). Against the background of a world dominated by the imperative of economic accumulation as a signifier of power, Walkaway examines the relationship between utopia and dystopia in a world that could resolve into either.

Walkaway works as both a critique of dystopia, and as an inspiration for the work of creating a utopia in the face of disaster. In this presentation, I examine how Doctorow uses dystopia and utopia to comment on contemporary society, and how he uses these narrative modes to interrogate the values and assumptions that underpin both orientations to the future.