Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
by Cory Doctorow
I’ve been really into Doctorow’s writing since I found out about it earlier this year. Down and Out is another anarchic, work-obsessed, fast paced fiction taking place in a near-future or parallel dimension of sorts (see Nimby and the D-Hoppers). I really enjoy listening to Doctorow’s podcast while getting ready in the mornings, so I’ve started noticing some repeating themes in his works: stored or out-of-body consciousnesses, immortality hacks and mods, bodily modification and enhancement of an exaggerated Donna Haraway sort, and anarchic-communistic-entrepreneurial-wiki worlds where change is the only guarantee.
Oh, and Disneyland/World. Doctorow has got a thing for Disney. Maybe this is because a ‘Disney World’ is like a huge, tangible sci-fi story; a speculative, engaging, surrounding, deep and detailed universe with fractured and interconnected stories acting on various levels of conscious/unconscious physical/emotional mass/individual levels. Well, as long as you’re able to snap out of the grumbling sense that you’re in a sweating mass of pushy queues and some jerk just extinguished a cigarette on your little brother (yes, that really happened to him at Disneyland). Or maybe that’s part of it, too. Disney isn’t really a utopian vision. There is war, propaganda, union-busting, communist witch-hunting, racism, sexism, corporate mismanagement and subtext that goes on forever and onwards both in the history and the artistic work of Disney. Unlocking the Disney vault or stepping through the gates of one of the magical kingdoms is an immersive fiction unlike anyother.
And so maybe this makes it the perfect familiar-place for Doctorow’s Down and Out to take place, whether we consider that story to be an our-world-in-the-future or a parallel dimension of sorts. The yarn itself if compelling, the characters now beloved, now hated, now accepted and familiar at turns. Julius is a member of the Bitchun world, where folks live lives of technology-saturated plenty, ad-hoc groups make things happen, and respect (Whuffie) greases the hinges which make the small world go round. He works at Disney World, where castmember ad-hocs and Imagineers are engaged in the complicated and exciting task of making the magic kingdom run, only Julius is convinced of a conspiracy by one ad-hoc to take over the Park…
Read: 10 March 2008
(bonus link, Achewood’s views on Disneyland)
