/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

Modesty has fed copies of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Alice in Wonderland to the Alicebot, a remixer that algorithmically combines texts into interesting cut-ups. The output is wild.


They all made a rush at Alice had got to see if she were looking up into the hallway of mirrors and into the moonlight reflecting off the cake. ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice hastily, afraid that it was her turn to Earth with me, but stuck fast when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she picked up a HUD with his head!’ or ‘Off with his knuckles. It was part of it.” Tom patted her arm.

Casually, grinning, she raises her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they started the game was going to dive in among the younger set, including the girl to shoot you and Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and Lil and I answered it. “Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently.

I hated getting distracted from a hook beside the door. “Once I am in favor of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted. “Oh, shit, I hate the process. Not so much about Whuffie, one way of expressing yourself.’ The baby grunted again, and gave me a genuine smile and tried to lead their eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it as to go see my team now.” She turned and came back online.

Review:

Strange Horizons

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Doctorow’s work is one of the main reasons I still read science fiction, so I looked forward to his first novel with great anticipation. The simple verdict? It’s good. A fast, funny, smart, clever book which entertains so well that it’s only upon reflection that its surprising sophistication and depths become evident.

Tim Pratt,
Strange Horizons

/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

I’m the Author of the Month at the excellent e-zine, Strange Horizons. They’ve published a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a long interview that Katsi Macdonald (daughter of James D. Macdonald and Debra Doyle) conducted with me, and have reprinted my short story, Visit the Sins, which initially appeared in Asimov’s and was later reprinted in one of Hartwell’s Year’s Best anthologies.

Grampa was switched off when Sean found him on the ward, which throbbed with a coleslaw of laser-light and video games and fuck-pix and explosions and car wrecks and fractals and atrocities.

Sean remembered visits before the old man was committed, he and his dutiful father visiting the impeccable apartment in the slate house in Kingston, Ontario. Grampa made tea and conversation, both perfectly executed and without soul. It drove Sean’s father bugfuck, and he’d inevitably have a displaced tantrum at Sean in the car on the way home. The first time Grampa had switched on in Sean’s presence — it was when Sean was trying out a prototype of Enemies of Art against his father’s own As All Right-Thinking People Know — it had scared Sean stupid.

Grampa had been in maintenance mode, running through a series of isometric stretching exercises in one corner while Sean and his father had it out. Then, suddenly, Grampa was between them, arguing both sides with machinegun passion and lucidity, running an intellect so furious it appeared to be steam-driven. Sean’s tongue died in his mouth. He was made wordless by this vibrant, violent intellect that hid inside Grampa. Grampa and his father had traded extemporaneous barbs until Grampa abruptly switched back off during one of Sean’s father’s rebuttals, conceding the point in an unconvincing, mechanical tone. Sean’s father stalked out of the house and roared out of the driveway then, moving with such speed that if Sean hadn’t been right on his heels, he wouldn’t have been able to get in the car before his father took off.

/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

Greg Dahlmann has done a piece on Northeast Public Radio about the Creative Commons that includes an interview with me about the online release of the novel. You can listen to the audio of the piece in a variety of formats or read the transcript here.

“He said, ’80-thousand people have downloaded your book and now represent a potential audience for the book we’re publishing in November’ and I said yes, that’s right… and you could hear him do a little dance of delight”

/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

In the spirit of Modesty’s cut-up generator, Ben Brown has created a Dadaist remixer for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Nice results:

When they danced knew I felt light headed. It back to Florida number of the animatronics had a fair but it, all that in for it came ire, but I made that now. We owed the people about taking promising that it.

He had looked like to control vest were something, besides the eye; of in the true from tip a roar of with had a seat.

Review:

NYT

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at boingboing.net), and his novel’s ad-hocracies of ”twittering Pollyannic castmembers” who smoke ”decaf” crack and congratulate one another on ”Bitchun” ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose. In one particularly amusing section, Julius recalls an ex-wife from space named Zed: ”We met in orbit, where I’d gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it’s a blast. You don’t stagger, you bounce, and when you’re bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.” Though she’s around for only a few pages, Zed is one of Doctorow’s best inventions, a ”transhuman . . . with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the R.F. spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine.” Julius can’t keep Zed’s interest, and their relationship ends on a sad note — she reverts to a backed-up version of her brain from the time before they met.

Taylor Antrim,
New York Times

/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

Today’s NYT is carrying a half-page, mostly positive review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in the main book-review section. I’m doing a panel tomorrow called “Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter,” but this may disqualify me!

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at boingboing.net), and his novel’s ad-hocracies of ”twittering Pollyannic castmembers” who smoke ”decaf” crack and congratulate one another on ”Bitchun” ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose.

Review:

Booklist

Welcome to Bitchun society, where all today’s commonplace problems have been solved: even death is a minor inconvenience, since one can make regular backups. Our hero has gone to Disneyland–his habit at times of major personal crisis–where he works for the ad-hocracy that runs the Haunted Mansion and the Hall of Presidents. It is a great honor to be working on the pinnacle of late-twentieth-century cultural and artistic achievement–Disneyland, that would be–and it inspires great loyalty. Our man begins feeling the pressure of change, however, after a cookie-cutter teenybopper shoots him dead for apparently no reason at all. Convinced that a new ad-hocracy on the block used his death to take over the Hall of Presidents, he vows to sabotage their plans and protect the sanctity of the Haunted Mansion. Thus begins a cycle of destruction and conflict with unexpected ramifications for the park–and his personal life. An excellent ride, entertaining and unpredictable.

Regina Schroeder,
Booklist
Review:

Entertainment Weekly

What better place to fantasize about our troubling evolutionary path than Tomorrowland? Doctorow takes the scariest scientific advances — cloning, medical immortality, an inter-networked world in which social standing is based on eBay-style ratings — and sets them inside a Disney theme park. More specifically, these techno-possibilities are the backdrop for a battle over the Haunted Mansion. Members of the governing “Ad-hocracy” want to preserve the attraction’s animatronic innards, but a techno-populist team from Disneyland Beijing has developed a way to flash-bake experiences directly on visitors’ brains. The resulting tug-of-war leads to on-line insurrections, fan-led coups, and an assassination. The futuristic roller-coaster that is Down and Out travels is more fascinating than the murder-mystery at its core. Still, Doctorow’s debut is a sci-fi ride worth lining up for. A-

Noah Robischon
Entertainment Weekly