After seeing the link to Cory Doctorow’s novella, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, about a gagillion trillion times, and reading him talk about it even more (who isn’t their own best spokesperson and PR rep?) I finally downloaded it and read it. It’s good. At about an hour’s read, it’s a rich, intriguing sci-fi melodrama, with a thousand openings for elaboration on Cory’s invented society and the humans Mark II which inhabit it. But some of the implications of Cory’s near-future are bothersome. I’ve been swatting them away for several days, the way you do movie plot holes and insults from people you have a crush on, but those spiny implications are now so far under the riding blanket, I’ve got to rest this horse. Ha. So, in an attempt to work through those niggling details, I’ve written The Lost Chapter from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in which I’ve extended some of the themes into what I consider logical exaggerations, working vaguely within the rough parameters laid out in Cory’s Bitchun world.
