Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. The language has pop and the ideas are launched from the page with plenty of fizz, but Doctorow ultimately hamstrings himself with a monumentally trivial storyline.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Meanwhile, Jules is trying to help out his suicidal friend Greg and also wondering why he shouldn’t just do like more and more of the bored population and simply deadhead-go intro cryogenic sleep until the world gets more interesting. He’s already died and been rebooted three times, so it’s not that big a deal, but when Jules’s competitors have him shot and killed, it’s still irritating.

When a new team of engineers plan to remake the old-school Disney attractions like the Hall of Presidents and the Haunted Mansion into virtual reality all-sensory assaults, Jules feels strangely protective. In this time of endless luxury, and a ridiculously endless buffet of life choices, Disney World remains a primary tourist attraction, and its most ardent supporter is clueless protagonist Jules, who works there with girlfriend Lil. Further, everyone has a Whuffie score, a constantly updated log of how much respect is afforded to you by your peers (it’s an insecure type of meritocracy). In the Bitchun world, everyone is wired within an inch of their lives and their personalities are backed up several times a year so that if their current body dies, a cloned one is simply grown for them and programmed with their last backup. Cyber culture maven and first-novelist Doctorow (no relation to E.L.) sets his perky little dystopia in a future world where the regular old society of today has been taken over by the Bitchun (pronounced, one would imagine, “Bitchin’ ”) Society. Walt Disney’s vice-like grip on the American imagination continues unabated, even many long years into the future when one might hope that people would know better.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow