Cory Doctorow meshes all of these outlandish ideas into a novel of power and skill. His story is told on many levels, with a surprising complexity and the perfect touch of humor. Like all good science fiction, Doctorow tackles the issues of today, tomorrow. Morality, cloning, socialism, poverty, right to die, freedom of choice, pratfalls of hubris, and the cult of celebrity are all explored in what may be the best debut science-fiction novel since Neuromancer.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is not for everyone. If you prefer your literature linear or your ideas staid, then give this one a pass. Using the tropes of the genre to blaze a new path, it showcases the talents and skills that popular literature needs to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

While relatively short (my guess is that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom clocks in at around 55,000 words), Doctorow packs a lot of action into this book. For those of you who are familiar with the technologies he describes, you’ll find the early going familiar, easy reading. For those of you who aren’t familiar with reputation capital or ad-hoc organizations, don’t worry: the exposition is handled well enough that you’ll understand everything in due course.

Fast, smart, fun and flashy: Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (Tor, $22.95) is all of the above. Even when science fiction is based on solid predictions, it can demonstrate the pinwheeling pyrotechnics of a first-class fireworks display.

A longtime observer of life online, Doctorow depicts a cashless economy based on the constant, automatic tracking of public reputations by a nameless online utility. Referred to as “The Bitchun Society” (a la President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”), the dominant lifestyle confers immortality (of a sort) on all participants. All one has to do is periodically record one’s brain patterns — to be imprinted on force-grown clones in the event of an unwanted death. (No charge for this service; there’s no charge for anything, as long as one maintains a high enough reputation.) It’s that trick that allows hero Jules to investigate his own murder.

In this future, Death is not necessarily fatal, but it’s annoying to lose the memory of a few days’ experiences. And in Jules’ absence, the Disney World “Hall of Presidents” ride he’s dedicated all his waking hours to preserving in an artistically pristine, mechanical state has been taken over by a group who ruined it with virtual bells and whistles.

That Doctorow is able to make readers understand and even sympathize with Jules’ far-out plight shows that he’s got as firm a grip on human verities as on the twists and turns a technologically driven society might take.