My first short story collection, “A Place So Foreign and Eight More,” is out. I’m following up on the success of my Creative Commons release-for-free experiment here by releasing most of the stories in the book as free downloads, under the same terms through which the novel was offered.
I’ve built a site for this book at:
Doctorow doesn’t undermine this adulation of Disney World with cheap irony. Rather, he presents it entirely on its own terms. The novel itself can’t really be called ironic; instead, it is permeated by a deadpan, slightly creepy sense of effusive sincerity. The characters are all “twittering, Pollyannic” people. They display a sort of dampened affect: a distant, impersonal warmth, unburdened by any hint of anxiety, let alone tragedy. They “can’t help but be friendly”; they have a “look of chirpy helpfulness at their instant disposal.” Sometimes the older folks, who still remember the pre- Bitchun world of scarcity and work, complain that the younger generation lacks fire and passion. But this crit-icism is simply unintelligible to those who have grown up with the Bitchun Society, and spent their entire lives in Disney World.
The book is designed simply, with key relationships being established with an economy of words that leads to a reading experience that I found immensely refreshing, accomplishing in approximately two hundred pages what other novels take four hundred to do. I must be becoming used to reading doorstops as the mid-point climax hit me like the slap of an enraged fat woman, unexpected and full of reverberation.
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.)
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.
I’ve created a mailing-list for occassional annoucnements of upcoming appearances, articles, stories and books. You can sign up here.
NASA’s astrobiology magazine has a good, in-depth review of the book in the current ish.
In his modernization of wearing your karma on your sleeve, society is governed by reputation and actions. This is not so much an ideal world, as a practical one which keeps considerable adventure and moves in anything but boring ways. ‘The whole point ..was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like.’
Therein lies Doctorow’s thesis: an internet-saavy version of personal capital, particularly one’s success rating with friends and neighbors. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom coins this all-encompassing and frequently updated reputation rating, one’s Whuffie.
While friends’ opinions may matter most in getting good Whuffie, a weighted score also makes room for those both likely– and unlikely– to be compatible. This version resembles a counterpoint system, and is called left-handed Whuffie: respect garnered from people who share very few of your own opinions. This is not a world of sycophants who seek mutual admiration. The future apparently holds true to both majority power, and also minority empowerment.
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.
