Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (review: 5/5)

This book reminded me how much I love science fiction. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which, per Cory Doctorow‘s tradition, you can download for free) takes place in a transhuman future. Poverty, scarcity, and sickness have been pretty much eliminated. Our hapless narrator-hero, Julius, has been killed (again) and his rivals are trying to take over one of his pet projects where he works at Disneyland. He fights back with the help of tenuous friendships and ill-formed plans, and it’s pretty much wonderful the whole way through.
One of the best parts about great science fiction (and I think this one counts) is just taking a few ideas and seeing where they lead, a sort of narrative thought experiment. Luckily Doctorow doesn’t get too explicitly philisophical, but there is some great hypothesis-spinning daydream material here. What if we were all networked, able to be really, individually connected to each and every other person? How does society recalibrate value where material scarcity no longer exists? If you could freeze your life for 500 or 10,000 years and wake up later, well… what would that be like? What’s the effect on human relationships? All this, and more. Go read it.