Immanentize the Eschaton

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a sci-fi novel set in the “Bitchun Society” of the near-ish future, a society that has solved the problems of scarcity and death. Indeed, death seems to be treated like an engineering problem, and the solution is to literally “refresh from backup”; people in the Bitchun Society backup their consciousness and memories to the Net. If someone suffers a fatal accident, a clone of the person is “force-grown” and the backup restored.

Our narrator is Julius, a composer/sociologist/operations researcher who is over 100 years old. He lives at Walt Disney World with his girlfriend Lil, who is 15% of his age. Living in the Magic Kingdom has been a lifelong dream for Julius (even in the future we have snowbirds). We also meet his best friend Dan (at first via flashbacks). Dan was a “missionary” for the Bitchun Society, but had no work after the whole planet was converted to the Bitchun Society. His Whuffie, which was astronomical, is now down to zero. He wants to crash with Julius and Lil while he brings it back up, after which he will kill himself.

(Whuffie is the currency of the Bitchun Society. It is completely based on reputation. If one’s Whuffie goes to zero, one can still eat, find shelter, etc., but it will be of the meanest kind.)

Dan joins Julius’s and Lil’s adhocracy, which is responsible for Liberty Square and the Haunted Mansion. Another adhocracy, run by Debra, revamps the Hall of Presidents. Julius is murdered, refreshed from backup, and believes Debra’s ad-hoc murdered him so they can take over the Mansion. There are too many spoilers to recount much more; suffice it to say that Julius believes he is slowly going mad.

Doctorow has a good read here. I was disappointed that he did not go into more detail on the Society and some of the questions that arise. For example, what does it mean to be murdered when death has been overcome? How does one dispense justice? How was the problem of scarcity solved? Doctorow doesn’t fill in these details. The book would be better if he had.

Download the book from www.feedbooks.com. You’ll be glad you did.