Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Tor
Reprint, 2018 – Original publication date, 2004
What
if you were effectively immortal? If, in the event of a fatal
accident or disease (or murder), your backed-up consciousness could
simply be reloaded into a young, cloned body? You’d have centuries
to create new things, to learn new skills, to explore – or to get
permanently bored and choose voluntary death.
What
if money had disappeared, and instead, the world ran on a currency of
reputation? If your wealth was measured in the number of likes you
got, the number of shares, claps, stars and badges allocated to you
by other members of society? The shy and retiring among us would be
penniless, the smartest, most creative, most altruistic or most outrageous
people, billionaires.
What
if you’d dreamed your entire life of living and working in Disney
World, and finally managed to make that dream real?
All
stories have their genesis in speculation, but science fiction,
especially, is driven by “what ifs”. Every scifi tale postulates
an alternative reality – future, present or past – which differs
from everyday experience in some fundamental ways. The best science
fiction chooses questions that are both intriguing and have some
moral importance. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory
Doctorow, falls into this category.
Jules,
the protagonist, is a mere century old. Though he has been rebooted
four times, he still remembers the world before the genesis of the
Bitchun Society. And although he now lives in a world where your
level of Whuffie determines both your influence and your quality of
life, he’s old-fashioned in some ways. He sticks with his friend
Dan through highs and lows of reputation. He’s squeamish about the
notion of deadheading – abandoning your body and bottling up your
consciousness for a few centuries or millennia, when things start to
get boring. And he’s sentimental about the primitive but
emotionally compelling attractions of twentieth century Disney World.
He cares enough about the legendary Haunted Mansion that he’ll go
to war and lose everything, trying to save it from being modernized
and virtualized.
I
don’t want to spoil your experience of Down and Out Etc. by
telling you much more about the plot. Doctorow’s alternative,
Whuffie-driven, world is eerily familiar in some ways, though the
book predated the social media tsunami by more than a decade. The
book considers whether electronically mediated experience can ever
have the same value as direct interaction with the environment –
and leaves that question open for the reader to decide.
We
haven’t gotten to the point of backing ourselves up for future
download, though the confluence of brain science and artificial
intelligence might be moving in that direction. Doctorow explores
some peculiar consequences of such technology, were it to emerge. For
instance, the longer you go between backups, the more of your
memories you’ll lose if you have to do a restore. Meanwhile,
someone can perpetrate a horrific crime, then restore from a backup
made before the deed, and literally have no memory of the event.
Down
and Out Etc. isn’t perfect. It relies too much on a familiarity
with Disney World and its attractions, which I don’t possess. Its
economic model may be a bit too optimistic, as well. I think the
economy posited in Doctorow’s more recent novel Walkaway, in
which the zotta-wealthy cling jealously to the world’s resources,
seems more plausible. On the other hand, the characters in this novel
are much more vivid, believable and flawed than those in the later
book. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, like all my favorite
science fiction, is a book about ideas, but it’s also about human
beings, love, fantasy and friendship.
And
by the way – the author, who is a strong proponent of Open Source, has made the book available for free via
Project Gutenberg. You can download it, in several different ebook
formats, from here.
