欧宝娱乐

(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

Okay, so it's finally time; time for me to finally make my way through the complete works of cutting-edge science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. After all, he's one of the four editors of my favorite website of all time, the profoundly unique pop-culture journal Boing Boing; and Doctorow's also a big champion of the exact political issues CCLaP cares about as well, including copyright reform, the elimination of so-called "Digital Rights Management" (or DRM) malware, the importance of do-it-yourself artists and the like. And besides, Doctorow also puts his money where his mouth is; that he's arguably* the most famous artist yet to offer digital versions of his projects for free download, meaning that a person can technically read his entire body of work without spending a dime, if one wants. All of these things mean that I should've become a completist of Doctorow a long time ago, and am in fact a little ashamed that I'm not; then add the fact that this thirtysomething's ouevre is not yet that large to begin with (only three novels, two story collections, and one book of essays), and I now really have no excuse.

I've decided, then, to tackle Doctorow's work in the order it was written; and that brings us at first to his explosive debut novel, 2003's "gonzo sci-fi" tale Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which has been heralded by not only critics but also peers and fans since almost the first day of its release. And indeed, now that I've read it myself, I understand why; because it turns out that Doctorow is not just a great cultural essayist, not only a dedicated technology activist, but in fact a legitimate creative genius as well, able to craft a story out of the dense tendrils of theoretical science and economics that nonetheless has a huge humanistic heart at the core of it, not to mention a pretty large amount of sincerely laugh-out-loud humor too. To start with, for example, the novel is set in a far-future society where scarcity is no longer a survival issue; where a form of free energy has been discovered and is now in use, where replicator-type machines can now create food and clothing from scratch, where even death has been eliminated through the dual perfection of both cloning and the digitization of consciousness. (So in other words, in the world of Down and Out, people can have their entire brain and all its memories "backed up" regularly to a computer system, which is then "uploaded" into a new body whenever the old one dies.)

Among many other profound changes to society, this has led to...