Book Review: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. It is set in the relatively near future. Death has been conquered. Everyone can eat. No one is homeless. But the world still has its problems.

The protagonist of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is Jules. He's relatively young (barely a century). He lives in, and loves, Disney World, where he is one of the employees. Disney, at this point, is run by ad-hocs, who take loving care of every aspect of the Magic Kingdom. But now, a new group wants to modernize things, and Jules is dead set on keeping them the way they are.

This is the Bitchun Society, though, and while no one starves or dies, there are still wealthy and poor people. They keep score in Whuffie, which is a complex and digitized version of respect. If Jules loses all his Whuffie, he will, indeed be Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

There are two ways two ways to look at Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. One is to view it as a sheer joy-ride fun novel, with adventure set in as Jules battles it out with his opponents, falls in and out of love, deals with his best friend and goes crazy for a while. The other way is to take it more seriously. What would life be like in a world where no one died and everyone had plenty to eat? To get the most out of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom I think you need to look at it both ways at once. Like much science fiction, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is about ideas, but it sets those ideas in an adventure story.

The only negative about the book is that it is a little hard to get emotionally involved with people who (as Jules meditates at one point) are, even at their poorest, better off than 99.99999 % of all humans who ever lived. Nevertheless Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is warmly recommended.