Went to a great discussion of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (2003) at the Conrad Sulzer Science Fiction & Fantasy club last night. I've read some of Doctorow's other work, and I'm a frequent reader of
Boing Boing (for which he is an editor and contributor), but this was my first time reading this particular novel. "Down and Out" is a kind of romp, mostly light-hearted but with some heavy ideas, through a post-scarcity, arguably post-human Disney World.
Doctorow is one of the leading voices in the fight for a smarter system of intellectual copyright and digital rights, by the way, and published this novel under a Creative Commons license that makes it freely available for download, as are many of his other works.
Most of the ideas we brought up got tossed around the table pretty evenly, and we referenced a lot of other works, so I'll try to list those in case anyone wants to look them up. Possible spoilers below!
