Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

In value per unit time, this book approaches Stargirl, which is the reigning champion for rewarding your reading time. The tone and storytelling have a similar feel.

In the lightly transhuman future, death and need are solved problems, leaving interest and desire. The Whuffie is a reputational currency that measures how much others respect you and are interested in what you have done. In Disney World, the battle of popularity rages between a traditional park and a virtual reality seeking to replace it. Even when death is a temporary inconvenience, is the Hall of Presidents worth killing for?

The plot really is a battle about innovation in theme park rides, which probably sounds strange and trivial, which it is. The real story is about the people involved in that struggle and the society they represent.

The real story is about hope and despair, with surprisingly deep but light despair that moves quickly and keeps going. Hope emerges to give us new opportunities to go a little deeper. You need those little plateaus and occasional lifts on the path to hitting bottom.

I mentioned Stargirl, which takes a similar idea of great promise and then shows it bottoming out. This starts lower and goes deeper. It opens with the protagonist's best friend contemplating suicide. Our protagonist is on the side of the traditionalists, such as they are, trying to preserve something in the face of popular innovation. This is the tale of a running, losing battle, with many creative applications of It Got Worse.

The Bitchun philosophy is not entirely specified. It involves freedom, rule by popular affirmation, ad hoc organization, and moving beyond death and material want. Combining that with the Whuffie makes the world more or less like high school on a grand scale, where your value as a human being is determined by your number of friends and fans on Facebook. If you are unpopular enough, someone can just drive your car off; it is not stealing if he can do something more popular with it.

That moderates and exacerbates the despair. The battle is that fierce because the stakes are that small. The worst case scenario is eternal life without fear of want, but people can still hurt each other in a variety of ways. Because people are like that.

The writing moves. It may take a little while to get into the concepts like backing up your brain in case you need to copy it to a cloned body, but the level of writing should be accessible to teens and up. You will rock through this book even if you are not a fast reader, and it produces its value for you quickly without making the prose a barrier. More authors need to write for painless reading.

How do we keep things painless with an aura of despair? It does not wallow. The bits of hope help, but the pacing and attitude do a lot. Also, if we can clone people and copy their brains, we can have mood-altering chemicals that keep us active and positive even while recognizing just how badly things are going. It is realistic without being pessimistic.

Our protagonist is surprisingly reliable despite literally having his brain break. You can tell that he is not at his best, that he is making mistakes, that a lot is going wrong on his end, but he is still portraying events accurately and giving us a solid view on the world (see also: All the King's Men). He is watching himself be out-maneuvered with great clarity.

I do not think I am selling it well. This is not one of those books that exists just to torture the protagonist. The problems exist for reasons, both for the plot and for the character development. There is a central tension that displays the protagonist's nobility and foolishness, with a recurring theme that explains the mistake-in-progress while making it a highly sympathetic thing to do.

I am someone who cannot watch sitcoms because of shying away from even embarrassing characters, so I should hate a story that paints high school-style popularity on a grand scale, but the telling and the pacing make it an excellent presentation with lots of value. So many stories make the reader suffer along with the character, but in this case, the author refuses to punish the reader, and you seem to lift the characters up from their despair rather than having them drag you down.

Also, to borrow a line from Heinlein, it is the anticipation of pain that causes suffering more than the pain itself. Despite my telling you, and despite the book's telling you just before it happens, you will still not see it coming when many of the problems hit. The writing and plot remain fresh and exciting.

Pausing my recommendation of the book, I am now going to criticize. As I said, the story has some weaknesses, largely due to the fridge logic of the various ideas it tosses around. Perhaps I should say that the setting as a whole does, although some of them might be intentional.

First, note the triviality of what is going on. Theme parks are serious business. We have ended all death and want so that people can make theme park rides the most important things in their lives? Is it more pitiful if our characters are typical, and all society has focused itself on this kind of thing, or if they are an obsessed minority fighting a meaningless battle on the fringes of nirvana. They are like Caroline, whose reaction to infinite opportunity is to find new ways to hurt herself.

Second, they have been slightly transhuman for a very long time. How can any society like this remain stable for longer than most current countries? How can humans mesh with their technology and shed their limits but remain so small? As I said, this might be intentional, when you consider what happened to the people who did not partake of immortality via brain backup. They died. These are the people left behind after others have pursued a truly post-human path, left behind like the dead. While they are comprehensible to us, the current humans, the fully upgraded must view them as monkeys who decided never to leave the trees.

Third, popularity as currency has some problems. A few are noted, and I might just point to the standard functions of money. The Whuffie is a fine medium of exchange, but it seems a fuzzy unit of account, and its utter failure as a store of value is repeatedly a major plot point. Reputational currency is a neat idea that may have some promise, but the Whuffie seems to break down if you poke at it too hard.

Fourth, why a theme park? As stated, the virtual reality efforts could be sent anywhere via the internet, and that must be worth more Whuffie.

I might normally savage a book for driving its plot by having its protagonist make bad decisions. Nope, even the worst decisions here make sufficient sense in the characters' context. He is flawed but not an utter idiot.

I also have no objection to the intentionally inflammatory elements, which are fairly tame and conservative. The setting is mildly transhuman, so some people make merry with their body configurations. Toss in some extra joints, limbs, feathers, whatever. Except for a few popular cosmetic bits, this is mostly portrayed as rare and weird. It becomes easy to look conservative after the complete upheaval of society.

Based on your notions of personal identity and continuity, you may have problems with the brain backup bit. This is brushed against in passing. If you would still think of it as "you" if we copied your brain into a new body then killed the original body, this is the perfect society in which you could be immortal (although, strangely, there are no cases mentioned of people multiplying themselves without offing the original). If that sounds wrong, and it would just create someone new who would think of him/herself as you, then this could be a continuous tale of horror as there are people who would "move to" a backup body to avoid the inconvenience of a cold. But, as our story notes, people who had those problems just died without leaving backup copies to annoy those whose identities persisted. Cheers!

I am not sure how the book will hold up to repeated reading, since the surprises will not be surprising. The quality of storytelling will remain the same, however, and the rapidity of reading will keep it worthwhile even if the marginal value decreases. Our protagonist makes a point that the best art (he is thinking of the Haunted Mansion at the time) gains value with repeated exposure, as you notice new details and experience it more fully. I will let you know how that goes in some number of years.

Amazon link

Or there are lots of free, legal copies online.

Flesh by Philip José Farmer

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This was on a list of 100 must-read science fiction books. It's crap.

The starship returned from its 800 year journey of exploration to find Earth degenerated. Environmental catastrophe had devastated the population, now reduced to medieval conditions and fractured societies devoted to fertility cults. Captain Stagg is adopted as the Sunhero, king of Deecee, with surgically grafted antlers making him the Horned King who is compelled to lead the rites.

The premise has promise. We see men fallen back to Earth, finding their society destroyed. Their captain gets swept up and forced to become part of the festivities; Earth managed to keep some biological skills, and Stagg's antlers pump him full of chemicals giving him the ability and drive to impregnate a hundred women a night for the fertility festivals.

Did I play that bit too softly in the plot summary? Think pagan fertility rites on the scale of thousands of people.

The prelude is worth reading. It stands on its own as a short story of a deeply carnal post-apocalyptic America. It gives you enough explanation to understand what is happening, and it creates a grand spectacle with a story wrapped in. Chapter V is worth reading. It gives you the next morning, when the captain is in the depths of suicidal despair after the previous night's rush of chemicals has worn off. He can remember everything he did, could not even try to prevent himself from wanting to do. And it gives you the course of his day as the chemicals again take hold, the exultation of being a Dionysian demigod with the promise of the cycle to continue. If you know anything about societies that anointed sun god kings from their best and brightest, you know the destination of all this.

The rest of the book is bad enough to keep it from being a 2.5. The B story is the rest of the crew, all of whom seem to be stock characters out of place in something trying to be a mature book. Maybe they were fresher in the 1960s, but the effect is of playing Star Trek straight in a setting that crosses the Twilight Zone with porn. Dealing with the psychological horror of being a hostage to alien desires does not mix well with Daring Spaceman Spiff. Maybe the contrast is intentional, but there is no sense of awareness.

The B story does have the merit of recognizing the problem of coming back to a society no longer your own. Some crew members face culture shock, as they were Daring Spacemen Spiffs against alien threats but found the same thing back home. What do you do when there is no home to go home to?

How do you send someone into space without thinking about how much things change over 800 years? We can hope that they had some unmentioned briefings on how to deal with the shock of returning to a vastly advanced Earth. Think about what Earth was like in 1200, and how much it will have changed since 2800. And you are underestimating that change, since the rate of change has increased.

Both plots become adventure stories that eventually meet in an ending that could best be described as "crimes against what is left of humanity," with a bit of literal deus ex machina. Along the way, we see the critical importance of a violent version of baseball, visit the nation of burkas and gay camp, and find other mixes of religion and sexual abuse.

If you have the strength of will to read just the prelude and one chapter, I can recommend this to you. That might encourage you to read more, however, so I cannot.

The link below is to Strange Relations, a collected edition with Flesh included. The cover bears note. In any other collection, it might be a contemptible cover to have nothing but a naked couple embracing, where she is a green-skinned space babe. Here, it makes perfect sense.

Amazon link

Prime Evil edited by Douglas Winter

Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Why an obscure collection of horror short stories from twenty years ago? A story from it was recommended as high octane nightmare fuel. Sadly, the collection fails to deliver.

This is a collection of horror short stories from 1988. Stephen King and Clive Barker are contributors.

Three stories are pretty good, worth reading if you get the chance. The rest are unexceptional. I will address them generally rather than discussing each.

The editor's introduction is a rumination on the state of the genre in the late '80s. I doubt that it holds anything new for horror aficionados, but it is an interesting perspective for the casual reader. It ponders some common sub-categories, such as vampire and werewolf stories, and their traditions from foundational works to recent books and films. (I had never thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a werewolf story, but it makes perfect sense once you point it out.) We look back two decades later on a view from the waning days of slasher films, before Scream ended the slasher era and films took a detour into torture porn.

This collection, of all things, made me realize how much I have underestimated the residual sexism in our society. Contrasting The Stepford Wives with its film remake three decades later, its fears relating to feminism and femininity had transitioned from horror to comedy. It might as well have been Anchorman. Now I see this, written around the halfway point between Stepford and today, and nothing had changed. In the first set of stories, the men exhibit the casual misogyny and dismissiveness that would immediately mark an unsympathetic villain or a fool today. Two of the three stories revolve around women entering male-dominated workplaces. At least the women are not made villains for it, which could suggest author support for male-centered status panic, but treating women as interlopers and objects is depicted as common and understandable, not embarrassingly sub-human. Here's a horror story: this memetic poison is still in the body politic, and people who took it with their mothers' milk are still running things. There are greater horrors on the news than in this collection.

I picked up the book for "Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" by David Morrell. I missed a bit of the value, as the recommendation included a spoiler I will omit. The editor classifies it under "secrets," and that is wholly appropriate. It is a well-crafted variation on a familiar story, the Lovecraftian recreation of another's search for secret knowledge. Our protagonist searches for what happened to his friend, while his friend searches for what happened to an artist. There is some indication that everyone involved knows what a really bad idea this is.

It has two variations on the theme of secrets and perception. First is the epiphany that lets you see what lies beneath the puzzle you hardly realized was there. Second is that once you have seen, you can never go back. There are some revelations that irrevocably change how you see the world. Being the kind of story it is, this is a rather dark, literal take on those ideas. You might pick that up from the early mention of people stabbing their eyes out.

Whitley Strieber's "The Pool" is a short read that earns its page count. The author seems to intend it as an alien contact story that muses on understanding and loss, Childhood's End in 10 pages. Given a different interpretation of the author of Communion (intended as non-fiction), one might take it as a musing on insanity and loss.

Several stories do or could be interpreted to play off the question of whether the story involves insanity or the supernatural. Stephen King tosses out (with little discussion) whether an actual vampire would be scarier than a serial killer who was playing at being one. About half the book does it to some degree, and I will leave it at that to avoid spoiling how each resolves the question.

Jack Cade's "By Reason of Darkness" mixes that with a good war story. War stories are often written as adventure, when horror seems so much more appropriate, doesn't it? The sections on war expertly dance across the myriad horrors of war, starting with sterile long-range bombing, passing through the visceral atrocities of the battlefields, and ending with post-traumatic stress disorder and all the cruelties of Catch-22 bureaucracy. The present-day story is not on-par with the flashbacks until the last scenes make it pay off. Before this, I had only 30 pages of story to recommend, so the book's 2.5 comes on the strength of this 50-pager.

Does a story about child sexual abuse count as horror? It's more of a constant stream of trauma.

M. John Harrison gets a mention for the most promising failure. While several of the stories brought nothing to the table, "The Great God Pan" creates a great aura of menace but never addresses what is going on. We get one image, and the rest is people refusing to discuss it. Letting the reader fill in the details is common, but you need more of an outline than "something potentially undesirable may have happened." On the plus side, the one image is sufficiently creepy, and the dialogue does a great job of having people speak past and around each other in a realistic way. It is this way of refusing discussion amidst vague hints that gives the story menace, but nothing ever solidifies. I am told there is a longer version out there, maybe that would better satisfy me. "Jane" by Marc Laidlaw had a stronger, starker take on this approach with a bit more showing (but still no explanation).

As a final recurring theme, how many writer characters can we stuff into one book? We have a newspaper writer, an editor and bookstore owner, an art historian plus compulsive diarists, a novelist, a storyteller, a children's author, and an unpublished novelist. Dennis Etchison wins the self-referential prize for being a television writer writing about television writers writing about a movie script. Two-thirds of the stories have writers as main characters. Dealing with our own personal traumas?

Amazon link

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I keep seeing this described as Ocean's Eleven in a fantasy setting. I have not seen Ocean's Eleven, so I will need to ramble as usual.

Locke Lamora cons fortunes from the nobles with a smile and a false identity. He and his Gentleman Bastards live in something like fantasy Venice, and their latest scheme could double their fortune. While this one unfolds, we tour through their history, and trouble in the criminal underworld threatens to disrupt neatly laid plans.

Note first that there are few fantastic elements in the setting. They see a lot of use, because they are used broadly, but only a few things separate Camorr from a completely mundane world. First, the city is built around the elderglass ruins of whatever race preceded humanity. There are grand, indestructible crystal towers, along with bridges and other applications marvelous and mundane. Second, various minor effects are classified as "alchemy," mostly in lighting and botany. The city has light globes instead of torches and lanterns, and plants might produce liquor or have unusual sizes, appearances, and flavors. Pack animals in the city are alchemically lobotomized to make them Gentle. Third, there is one order of sorcerers in the world. Their services are exceedingly expensive, and so minor or rare, but they are subtle and powerful.

The story starts a bit slowly. We open on Oliver Twist, as Locke's childhood exploits are being recounted between two old hands. He is being sold from an aged master of child thieves to a con man who could better use (and stand) the audacious orphan. The opening is also darker than what follows, with death, hardship, and coarse language.

This sets the darkness of the background, while Locke is a bright foreground. He is bold in a drab and murky world. Locke runs on refuge in audacity and Bavarian fire drills, so forgive me if I overuse "audacious" today. That really is his modus operandi: walk in like you own the place, take what you want, and make it so big that either no one doubts or they fear the consequences if they show doubt. Why try to purloin a few silver when you can ride away with a cart full of gold? If anyone does try to call you on it, point it out first, because what kind of thief would tell you he is robbing you?

This leads to slightly over the top fun. The schemes must be too big to be doubted. The preparations for that are equally elaborate, as in stage magic: massive work to create a small effect that looks effortless and natural. Not only do you not know where to look, but if you did, you would never think of going to such lengths. The only place where this goes too far ("all this for that?") is when we see how far Locke will go for a new suit, which struck me as a failed Crowning Moment of Awesome. Or maybe you will love that in a Jack Sparrow sense.

For me, the best part of this comes when detailing the central heist. The plan has a few levels, and it keeps getting better as more of it comes to light. The chronological order is staggered so that we can drop back a bit and see what lies behind what just happened, until we are fully caught up and the action can proceed.

Even then, the flashbacks to the early days of the Gentleman Bastards are frequent. These are set as their own chapters, and each is relevant to what is happening in the main story. The explanation may come slightly after, or it may take until the end of a chapter or arc to see where the last flashback fits in, but the placement is always good. My only argument with them is that I thought the line should have been, "I just have to hold on until Jean gets here." Sorry, I know that has no meaning to those of you who have not already read it, but it becomes a plot point.

A beauty of writing this is that I have been, and will be, dropping plot points and spoilers without noting them because they will not be meaningful until you have read the book. If Bob has been pretending to be Charlie, I can talk about Bob all I want and not a thing will be spoiled when Charlie finally reveals who he has been all along. And boy, will you be surprised when you find out there is a real Charlie, ha! There are layered cons and deceptions in a Thirty Xanatos Pileup, so I can say anything and you will not know if I am giving you the cover story, the backup lies, the real story, or something I made up. Hey, Locke's right, this is fun!

Thanks to Scott Lynch for writing it that way. He makes use of it a bit himself in the book.

Helping that along is a B-plot that more or less literally tries to murder the A-plot and take its place, or perhaps reveal itself as having been the A-plot all along. Yes, the plot lines are conning each other the same way the characters are. I like that.

Capa Raza emerges as a villain, but the emotional stakes are lowered by the lack of righteous indignation. Robbing and murdering thieves and murderers is just more turnabout, the game they play with their lives, not something you can really hold against the bad guys when the good guys' friends and allies torture innocent people to death. Sure there are degrees, and the Gentleman Bastards try to hold themselves above it by being just thieves (not murderers) and playing Robin Hood (without the "giving to the poor" bit, which fits the original story anyway), but there are still a lot of innocents being caught in the wake. Raza steps it up, but he is rarely much worse than those around him. He just happens to target the protagonist.

On a different piece of fridge logic, I would like to point out that currency deflation is not wealth destruction. The thieves' death offerings destroy coinage, not the things that coins can buy. If you throw a thousand gold coins in a pit, the world has not lost any buildings or loaves of bread. You have just surrendered your claim on a share of it. No, I do not expect a novel to go into this, any more than I expect inflationary discussion after heroes claim a dragon's hoard.

Returning to our cast, the characters are enjoyable and done well in both bold and fine strokes. Characters are clear in their first presentation and acquire better definition as they are relevant to the plot.

Locke is audacious (yet again) and very good at what he does. He is charismatic and dexterous. He is also neither a hero nor a fighter, and Scott Lynch is not afraid to throw in a variety of character who can leave him writhing on the ground. Jean is his complement, the pudgy bruiser who excels at math and sewing. He reads historical romances and kills people with axes. Nazca is a good example of a minor character done well, likable and somewhat nuanced, adding to the story without stealing the spotlight.

Our cast displays range as well as depth. There are different kinds of intelligence, different kinds of skill. This is a recurring theme of the flashbacks that makes itself known in the present. Chains assesses their experiences, their areas of expertise, and their combat abilities. Some people are better for some jobs or roles. This is cited repeatedly without becoming overworked. We have a central protagonist without making him the master of all trades, nor reducing his friends to support staff with second-tier abilities, nor making it a team show.

I have more positive things to say, but I am running low on ones I can use without real spoilers. I am still debating whether the rating should be a 4. The writing and plot are of excellent quality, and it would surely be enjoyable to re-read, but much of the joy comes from watching the layers of the onion come apart. It could certainly be worth one re-read, to appreciate the edifice while knowing what lies beneath, noting foreshadowing and how bits of the plots are hiding in plain sight. Like a mystery, however, there is likely not much to gain after that. I will let you know someday, after a re-read.

Amazon link