Cory Doctorow is pretty famous on the internet. He’s originally Canadian, although he may live in the U.S., where he writes full-time, between BoingBoing.net and his fictional endeavors, and he is much sought-after as a lecturer and speaker on various topics relating to copyright/copyleft, intellectual property, the internet, and science fiction. He’s written four novels and a couple collections of short stories; I’ve reviewed Little Brother and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town already. This novel was his first published full-length work; it was published in 2003. Mr. Doctorow’s other claim to fame, at least on my review site, is that all of his books are readily available as Free (Legal) Books on the Internet; he has made sure that they are all available via a Creative Commons license on various websites. I read this one via DailyLit.com.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in the future, probably about a hundred years or so, where people don’t die anymore due to the ability to download one’s entire brain and restore it into a cloned copy of one’s body. Governmental entities have been replaced by ‘ad-hocs,’ which appears to be shorthand for an ad-hoc group of whoever’s interested in doing whatever it is, and monetary currency has been replaced by Whuffie, which is a score of how much respect other people have for you. Julius lives in this world; he’s a hundred and twentyish when the book starts, and he lives in Disney World. He’s a member of an ad-hoc that runs a certain portion of the place. One of his old friends, Dan, calls him up; he’s broke (very low Whuffie) and sick of life and wants to die. Julius convinces him to live long enough to restore his Whuffie, and he does. However, strange things are afoot at Disney World. There’s another ad-hoc that seems as if it may be making a play for the place. Can Julius survive, and keep his Whuffie score?

I’ve never been to Disney World, and I suspect I’m the only person in existence who really doesn’t want to go. On the other hand, I’m not a complete cultural dolt, and I know what it’s supposedly like there. It’s a bit odd to consider that so many parts of the place will survive a hundred years past now, without any major new rides or areas being added. Julius’s Disney World is somewhere between a live-in resort park and a museum for the late-20th-early-21st-century Disney World, that exists right now. Like my complaint about Roo’d, this is a book that depends too much on 20th-and-21st-century cultural references, although it’s only to one specific location/event/icon. In other words, I don’t believe that Disney World won’t be completely changed in the next hundred years. I understand that Mr. Doctorow came up with a moderately logical explanation, but it didn’t work for me.

I also had an awful time believing the relationship between Julius and Lil. They had no chemistry together on the page. I think Julius had more chemistry with Dan than anyone else, and that, I’m sure, was intentional; Mr. Doctorow was, I assume, intending this more to be a paean to male friendship than to romantic relationships (Julius swears them off sometime around the end of the book). The rest of the female characters in the book were either dastardly, insane, or just plain mean. The male characters, on the other hand, all appear to be manipulated by the female characters around them. They only do nasty things to Julius, or in general, because one of the few female characters is ordering them to do them. I’m not exactly sure if that was intentional on Mr. Doctorow’s part, or just a bizarre subconscious accident, but I find it moderately disturbing.

The world that Mr. Doctorow has created is quite interesting; I liked the idea of ad-hocracy, even as I find it as improbable as anything else. I thought deadheading (getting stuck in a jar, or something, for a number of years, like being cryogenically frozen only without the cryogenics) was a good concept, and a good way to deal with too many people on the planet at once. (I like Lisa Goldstein’s generation-skipping better, though.) I even liked Julius, and I thought his reactions to everything that was happening were honest and realistic. However, I had enough trouble with the premise of the book and the (possibly inadvertant) misogyny that I don’t really know if I liked it or not. Judged on its own artistic merit, it’s well-enough written, paced, and characterized; I just reacted badly to his conclusions, so although my enjoyment of the book was about 2/5 stars, it’s probably worth 3.5/5 or 4/5 stars.