Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was published by Tor Books in 2003 and simultaneously released under a Creative Commons license — one of the first novels by a major publisher to be freely available for download, establishing the model of digital generosity that would become Doctorow’s signature practice.
Julius is a member of an ad-hoc group that maintains the Haunted Mansion ride at Walt Disney World. In this future, death has been eliminated (consciousness is backed up and restored into fresh bodies), scarcity has been abolished (nanotechnology provides material abundance), and the only currency that matters is Whuffie — a real-time reputation score that rises when people respect you and falls when they don’t. Julius loves the Haunted Mansion with a passion that is simultaneously genuine and pathological, and when a rival group threatens to replace its analog animatronics with a direct neural-stimulation experience, he goes to war.
The novel is thin on traditional plot but rich in ideas. The Whuffie system is a prescient satire of social media metrics, published a year before Facebook existed. The post-scarcity economy raises questions that remain unanswered: if everyone has enough, what do people compete for? The answer — prestige, creative control, the power to shape shared cultural spaces — turns out to be a more honest description of what drives human conflict than any economic theory.
Collecting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2003): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30
- Signed: $50–$120