World Famous Comics: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
By: Cory Doctorow Publisher: Tor Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Tor Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 208 Publication Date: December 05, 2003
On The Skids In The Transhuman FutureJules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war....
I wanted to like this, I really did. It's not very clever to be a book reviewer on the internets and confess that a Cory Doctorow novel kind of leaves me cold. I like Boing Boing as much as the next person. I often admire his work as a journalist. This was my first attempt to read one of his novels. So many people have recommended the books to me. I wish that I could have liked this more, I really do.
He gets right exactly what you expect that he would get right. He hits the big future world points of karma credits (Whuffie) instead of cash and life extension technology. He has the hacking of pop culture and alternate forms of social organization and all the other little touches that you will not be at all surprised to see. I wish very much that it had not read quite so much like a textbook projection of what life will be like after the Singularity comes, because that was pretty much exactly what the book felt like. Making a point, working it out.
Fair enough, but I missed characters that I could care about. And I really missed some heart to the thing. Charles Stross writes in a similar subject area and honestly his books are way messier than Down and Out. Still, I like them much better. I had the feeling as a reader that Doctorow liked his clever ideas much more than he liked his characters. I never warmed to any of them, and I never once cared what would happen. Too bad.
There are certainly going to be people who enjoy the novel. It is cleanly written and cleanly plotted. At 206 pages, you can read it and enjoy it without missing the soul too very much. I am curious to hear from others whether all his work is like this, or whether there are other books that I might enjoy more. Let me know.
Good world I really enjoyed reading about the world the author has imagined. He explores some interesting problems, like, "If you didn't have to die, would you want to live forever?" and, "How important IS what other people think of you?" (In the world he has created, what other people think of you is everything.)
The character development left me a little cold. I was unclear as to why the narrator allowed things to end as they did.
All in all though, good, fun read, and neat world.
High-potential near-future tale Jules takes his ad-hoc job at Disney World seriously. In fact, he takes it so seriously he's murdered and when he comes back (in the Bitchen society everyone comes back--from backup copies loaded into clones) an alternate ad-hoc has taken over the Hall of Presidents and is threatening to move on Jules's precious Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Unfortunately for Jules, all of his ideas for stopping Debra from changing the way the rides work to focus on direct brain manipulation.
Due to a (coincidental?) defect, Jules's new clone is unable to connect to the network, leaving him without the ability to create a new backup. The doctors suggest terminating immediately before he loses more memories, but Jules can't make himself give up so much--especially when he's got to fight to keep Debra from destroying even more. But everything Jules does seems to lead to more trouble--and to a dismaying decline in his Whuffie (reputation points--which in the Bichen society are pretty much used for everything).
Author Cory Doctorow is playing with some intriguing ideas here. If immortality is available, if material things can be created free, if danger can be ignored because death simply means restarting from the last save point, how will the world change? The idea that reputation will mean more than money is not too big a stretch--after all, already a reputation can be worth money. Doctorow also draws from the 1960s 'teach-in' movement when students took over classrooms and attempted to teach real and relevant material, extending this notion, with embellishments from the free software movement, to a complete future world.
So, how's it all work. Well, there's a lot of potential here. I would have liked to see a bit more about how society manages itself when everything is based on Whuffie. How do dirty jobs get done? Doctorow states that the zero-Whuffie group gets along fine, but would they? Or would high-Whuffie people perhaps hunt them down (for the betterment of society? Or maybe just for fun), since low-Whuffie-types are clearly not worth the resources (you can certainly take their property, of course in the Bitchen society, there is no property). The larger problem is that it's hard to really put yourself in Jules's place. He doesn't really have evidence about who killed him and doesn't bother looking for it. He engages in more and more eratic behavior--explained perhaps by the clone-defect but still hard to identify with. I wanted to see why Jules thought Dan was so wonderful, wanted to feel the loss when Lil threw him out, wanted to understand why we cared about her parents--living or dead-head.
DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM is an interesting and thought-provoking read. It's certainly readable and even interesting. Maybe it's my problem that I thought it could be so much more.
A Fanboy's Dream I'll be honest. I'm a fanboy.
I've visited Walt Disney World many times since my first visit in 1982. Ever since my first visit, I've been a huge fan of the Haunted Mansion. That is exactly what pulled me into buying this book.
I have not read the book in a while, so no detailed review, but more of reflections here.
For starters, let's say that I'm not sure how I would like this future. Sure, it's a great future where we could actually be able to live in the Magic Kingdom? I know I would. I was the weird kid that always told his mother that he wanted to live in the Haunted Mansion (I'm not kidding). So, just the novelty of that is enough to draw me into the story. But a future where nobody ever really dies because we will make regular backups of our brains? I'm a bit lazy for that. Give me an immortality pill.
This does have some themes visited in recent movies, most notably the dead guy trying to find out who killed him. That's one of two major plots of the book -- the other being a war over the control of the Haunted Mansion.
That second plot point is what seemed to speak to me the most. I had been involved in the Haunted Mansion fan community for a while when this book was released. One thing is for certain: he knows its fans and the divisions that happen every time even the slightest thing is changed in the Mansion.
This is not a perfect book -- I found it to be a bit slow at times, so not quite a quick read, despite the length. But it did keep me engaged enough to go until the end.
Yes, the book has been freely available through the Creative Commons licensing, but just skip over the freeness and buy the real book.
Enlightening It took me a while to make it through the first chapter,it seemed kind of dense. I'm glad that I kept reading on though, It just kept getting better and better. I liked the small Snow Crash reference later. A must read for anyone into the new age of Sci-Fi.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
