Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

See this review and others over at my blog: http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com

I've never read anything by Cory Doctorow before, but I know he has a fairly big presence on the internet as co-editor of boingboing.net, and is a very vocal propponent of liberalizing copyright law, as well as proponent of creative commons law, which this particular book was published under. This is his first novel (published a while ago), and I was actually pretty interested to see whether his writing as going to include a polemic against digital rights management or not. Luckily this turned out to not be the case.

Down and out in the Magic Kingdom takes place in what I guess could be described as a post-scarcity world. Death has been conquered by the means of regular brain backups, socioeconomic problems have been overcome by the advent of an idealized “meritocracy” where how wealthy you are depends on how much the people around you admire and respect you. And even if you don't have any respect, you can still get the essentials to keep you alive. On top of all this, everyone is connected by “hyperlink” implants which connect them 24/7 to a future version of the internet. The story follows Julius, who is basically an average joe, who after having lived for lifetimes and acquired a couple of doctorates and a penchant for studying crowds, ends up working at a future incarnation of Disney World. Here he makes a series of well meaning but stupid decisions in an attempt to prevent the encroachment of a rival “team” on his team's territory running the haunted mansion. In the process he more or less dismantles his life, one piece at a time.

So the positives. The prose was good. No cringe inducing sentences. That always gets a book at least two stars from me. The plotting was pretty good, and those two things together usually get at least three stars out of me, but in this case I just couldn't do it. I also thought Cory did a pretty good job of speculating what a post-scarcity society might look like. However . . .

I think the biggest issue is that I was just super ambivalent about the main character. The other side of this is that he made so many obviously stupid decisions throughout the course of the book, well, it just seemed gratuitous. Maybe I would have liked the character more if he even made just one logical decision, but Cory Doctorow seemed to think up all the different ways Julius could respond to a given situation and then pick the worst one every single time. I know this can be a kind of plot device that adds some tension to a novel, and even Jim Butcher admits to thinking this exact way in his Dresden Files books (over at his live journal somewhere), but whereas I still felt invested in Harry Dresden, I didn't much care for Julius. The only thing I can say is that there must be a fine line somewhere in when using this technique and Butcher and Doctorow fall on opposite sides of it.

The other big issue I had was with the plausibility of the merit based wealth system. Usually I try not to critique this sort of thing because, hey, the author can do what he wants. On the other hand if the author does something implausible he/she had better be good making me suspend my disbelief (admittedly that's not too hard in my case). In Doctorow's system, wealth is based on public opinion. If people like you and think you do good work, you are automatically wealthy by some nebulous “whuffie” score. While reading, I kept thinking, “why is this world not run by used car salesmen?” Doctorow implies that only the best people for the job would be doing the job, because everyone would recognize that they are the best. Two fundamental assumptions here are a) everyone's opinion is based on logical thought, and b) everyone has all the facts needed to form an logical opinion. I find it much more likely that those with the best rhetoric/publicity would end being the wealthiest. Anyway, I kept thinking about this the whole time I was reading the book, and felt it detracted from the experience.

So I guess, in summary, technically speaking its not a bad book, but I had enough issues with it for the read to not be as enjoyable as I had hoped.