Jules, or Julie to his few friends, is a 100-year-old young adult in a brave new world, a global culture known as the Bitchun Society, where the trio of scarcity, mandatory work and death are obsolescent concepts. This utopia lies not far ahead in our future: In fact, the oldest members of the Bitchun Society were born into the ancient world of mortality and dearth of resources. Jules himself recalls the outmoded paradigm of his childhood, before the shift, and has trouble relating to the youngest generation, such as his live-in girlfriend, Lil, only in her 20s. Much more simpatico is Keep A-Movin' Dan, an older roguish cowboy who specializes in converting the few pockets of often dangerous renegades still surviving into the new age. But Dan has run out of potential converts and indeed feels that eternal life holds nothing more for him. He's determined to commit real suicide. But first he has to build up his Whuffie.

Whuffie is the basis of the new world's economy. A kind of peer-dispensed, cybernetically maintained status system, Whuffie has replaced money and celebrity. If Dan goes out Whuffie-less, he'll look like a loser, whereas going out Whuffie-rich will make him a noble hero. Luckily for Dan, Jules and Lil have a plan to get Dan back on top. The lovers, we learn, live in Disney World. The park still functions as a resort and amusement land, but it's not run by Disney Corp. any more. (Corporations are extinct, what with Free Energy and all.) Ad-hocs, or communal mini-democracies, have divvied Disney World up into enclaves. The ad-hoc that Lil and Jules belong to runs the Haunted Mansion, among other rides. Making Haunted Mansion the best ride in the park will accrue massive Whuffie to all. But there's a hitch.

A rival ad-hoc, led by the vicious schemer Debra, has staged a coup at the Hall of the Presidents, and now seems to have their sights set on the Haunted Mansion. The internecine warfare that ensues will prove that even utopia can bring out the worst in its citizens. Will Jules recover from his very public murder and the failure of his onboard cyber-adjuncts? Will the park's Imagineers be able to top the insidious flash-bake techniques employed in the Hall of Presidents? Will Lil escape the influence of her parents, who are deadheading into the future? Will Dan change his mind about suicide, choosing something even crazier? And will old Walt's dreamland ever look the same after Jules and Lil are done with it?

It's a post-Singularity world after all

Cory Doctorow first achieved widespread acclaim some years ago with publication of a touchingly skewed story titled "Craphound" (a story brought to print, in fact, by Science Fiction Weekly editor Scott Edelman in his prior role as editor of the lamented Science Fiction Age, and which will doubtless appear in Doctorow's forthcoming collection from Four Walls Eight Windows). "Craphound" illustrated Doctorow's wicked sense of humor; his ability to take familiar, perhaps even overworked concepts and impart a new magical luster to them; and his facility for creating schlubby losers who nonetheless deeply hook your sympathy and interest. All these talents are brilliantly on display in this novel, one of the funniest and cleverest debuts in a giant sea turtle's age.

Doctorow aligns himself right from the get-go with an axis of serious jocularity, whose members are such folks as Rudy Rucker, Robert Sheckley, Matt Ruff, Jonathan Lethem and, at his loosest, Bruce Sterling. These authors spin off wild blue-sky ideas in rigorous profusion, as many as any recognizable hard SF author, but couch them in absurdist plots populated by eccentrics and oddballs. (It's interesting, for instance, to compare Doctorow's book with John Wright's The Golden Age [2002]), which deals with many of the same issues of posthuman living, but ! in a sober, leaden tone.) Life is not to be taken too seriously in the works of these writers, and Doctorow has come up with a great objective correlative to this attitude, in the ability of his protagonists to spring back even from explosive bodily destruction, like Wile E. Coyote. (The downloading-into-clones motif was definitively established by John Varley 30 years ago, but even he did not employ it so blithely.)

In any case, what we have here is a rare example of post-Singularity fiction. The Singularity, or Spike, is deemed to be that moment at which mankind emerges into transhuman existence, with or without the help or hindrance of strong AI. (Doctorow eschews the AI, for the most part.) Envisioning such a future is one of the hardest tasks an SF writer can take on, but Doctorow proves himself equal to the challenge. His reorganization of society into ad-hocs craving Whuffie derives a lot from present-day cyber-culture (Slashdot, and all that), and his biomorphic mutability seems positively Extropian. But the exact mix is unique, especially when the fixation on Disney World as a kind of prototype for artificial landscapes is thrown in. And surely Jules' jazzy first-person narration, laden with future jargon, is essential to the success of the tale. Although readers might initially balk a bit when encountering on the second page of the book a sentence such as "I took! a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it."

"Ten thousand years ago, the state of the art was a goat," opines Dan at one point. Well, by that measure Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is some kind of transgenic supergoat whose milk is full of spidersilk proteins and nutraceuticals.