Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision is so far out there, you’ll need your GPS to find your way back.
This is not technically a novel, but rather a collection of my short fiction. This book won the 2004 Starbust Award for Best Canadian Science Fiction Book, and sports a kick-ass introduction by cyperpunk legend Bruce Sterling. Many of the stories in this have won or been nominated for prestigious awards, including the Nebula and Sturgeon awards.
Six of the nine stories are available as a free download in a multitude of formats, as well as a physical object at bookstores everywhere.
Audio edition courtesy of Podiobooks.
Boston Globe, August 2003
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.
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!
more
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.
Business 2.0 commissioned this short-short story from me as a sidebar to a feature of way-out technologies written by my pal David Pescovitz (who co-edits Boing Boing with me. It was really challenging trying to squeeze all those technologies into such a short piece!
more
