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Walkaway is a utopian disaster novel. It’s a novel about people doing right for one another under conditions of adversity. It’s a deliberate, tactical rebuttal of the science fiction stories (including my own) that resort to the easy, lazy trope of having civilization erupt into violence, rape, and chaos the minute that technology fails. Those are stories whose underlying theory of humanity is that a large number of people are just bastards, and if they thought they could get away with it, they would come over and kill you and eat you and wear your skin.

The legendary musician, producer, and weirdo Brian Eno has many notable accomplishments and high among them is the production of the ‘‘Oblique Strategies’’ deck, a deck of cards emblazoned with gnomic and hard-to-parse advice that is meant to shake your creative rut: ‘‘Fill every beat with something,’’ or ‘‘Infinitesimal gradations’’ or ‘‘Do nothing for as long as possible.’’

My favorite of these – first learned from Bruce Sterling – is ‘‘Be the first person to not do some­thing that no one else has ever thought of not doing before,’’ which I think of as being a bit like a lifestyle version of Jenga in which you remove something you’ve always assumed was vital and see whether everything falls over.

‘‘I’m working on a third Little Brother book now, for adults, called Crypto Wars. Paramount has the film rights to the first one. I’m doing some screenwriting for the first time. I’d always resisted screenwriting, because everything I’ve ever written that’s fiction has been published, and screenwriting is the last scene of Indiana Jones, over and over again, the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done, and it’s in a warehouse somewhere, and no one’s allowed to know it exists. My agent was able to cut a deal where even if no one turns this stuff into a movie, I could turn the writing into books and stories. Russ Galen is the agent. He’s amazing. He’s also the agent for Philip K. Dick, Norman Mailer, and Arthur C. Clarke, and there are a remarkable number of PKD and Arthur C. Clarke movies where he’s an executive producer, so he’s got a lot of experience. It’s through a media company I like, a fairly new one that’s done some incredible work, so I’m happy to be doing it. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I sell books after I’m finished, partly out of superstition that if I sell the book and can’t finish it, that would be a problem, but also because in general my career has just gone up, and the longer I wait to sell a book, the more I can get for it.’’

That presents a paradox: if the purpose of lifehacking is to mindfully choose your priorities, what can you do when that process leads you to a position where no more choices are possible?