Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today’s technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world.

Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you’re going to find.

Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn’t put the book down.

Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil’s transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.

Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted – though that should be enough recommendation to read his work. *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom* is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards.

Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he’s always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture.

Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I’ve come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers’ speculations end. It’s a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie.

Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world. Not only that, but money’s been abolished and somebody’s developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society–and make sure you’re strapped in tight, because it’s going to be a wild ride. In a world where everyone’s wishes can come true, one man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams–Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated, human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the true from the false.

Cory Doctorow–cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter–uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it’s hard to see where we’re going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the park.