Internet Book #3: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Cory Doctorow
This is somehow related to the internet. Because, uh, he has a blog? And he posted the book online? And he's got an online presence? Something. So it's not related to the internet in the same way the other books I've read are directly related to personal sites and personal writing, fine. Fine! I didn't want to mess up a perfectly good theme, okay? Okay.
So this is a good old-fashioned science-fiction, except it's not exactly old-fashioned, and it's pretty hilarious, and I would call it post-modern, if I had any idea, any more, what postmodern is supposed to mean.
It feels like a punk kid's satire of your standard "this is what the future will become!" kind of re-imagining, except that it also seems totally serious, and he seems to love his subject, and his world, his future. It's a fast and fun and incredibly imaginative read, and even though I do not generally point to the sci-fi zone on the spec fic scale, I liked it immensely.
This is somehow related to the internet. Because, uh, he has a blog? And he posted the book online? And he's got an online presence? Something. So it's not related to the internet in the same way the other books I've read are directly related to personal sites and personal writing, fine. Fine! I didn't want to mess up a perfectly good theme, okay? Okay.
So this is a good old-fashioned science-fiction, except it's not exactly old-fashioned, and it's pretty hilarious, and I would call it post-modern, if I had any idea, any more, what postmodern is supposed to mean.
It feels like a punk kid's satire of your standard "this is what the future will become!" kind of re-imagining, except that it also seems totally serious, and he seems to love his subject, and his world, his future. It's a fast and fun and incredibly imaginative read, and even though I do not generally point to the sci-fi zone on the spec fic scale, I liked it immensely.
1 Comments:
I'm guessing the Internet connection is primarily noted because he's one of the BoingBoing bloggers (as in, gets more traffic each day than my site will get in its lifetime).
I read this recently and really liked it a lot. I love the way he plays with serious topics, like how would we act as a society if we no longer had to work for a living or if national/state/county governments were replaced by looser associations based on things other than geography? How would our lives be different if our personal knowledge/memories/data could be restored from backup to a new body if our original one died?
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