Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a short novel, only just clocking up two hundred pages. This is an entirely welcome thing at a time when twice that length seems to have become a bare minimum. It’s quick and snappy, pared of all flab. It is not, though it has often been called it, a fun book. This perception is probably due to Doctorow’s sprightly, bantering style. The story itself however is concerned with betrayal and mental breakdown. In this, Paul Di Filippo is right on the money when he identifies Doctorow as being aligned with the axis of serious jocularity (he could also have been describing himself.)
Monthly Archives::
June 2003
This is pretty amazing: Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder of Amazon, gave my book a plug on NPR’s Weekend Edition today, during a segment on summer reading.
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
The Infinite Matrix, July 2008
Podcast:
Part One,
Part Two,
Part Three
Year’s Best Science Fiction 9 (edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)
Solaris Magazine (French Translation by Elisabeth Vonarburg), 2004
Sci Fi World (Chinese translation), September 2004
ESLI Magazine (Russian translation), 2005
Bli-Panika (Hebrew translation), 2005
Italian Translation, 2006, by Giovanni Ella
This one literally came to me in a dream: I woke up one morning, shortly after moving to San Francisco, with this whole story in my head. I wrote it over the next two weeks, and, what, three years later?, Asimov’s finally published it!
This story has also been translated into French by Elisabeth Vonarburg, for the Quebecois magazine Solaris in 2004. You can download it from here under a Creative Commons license.
In 2005, the Russian SF magazine ESLI reprinted this magazine in Russian translation. Download it here under a Creative Commons license.
Here’s a 1.7MB Tarball of this story in Chinese, with illustrations, taken from the September 2004 ish of Sci Fi World magazine. It’s offered under a liberal Creative Commons license — enjoy!
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