Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

A quick read, sci-fi with a lot of great ideas that drive the content and action.

In the not-too-distant future, immortality has been attained by serial use of clones to replace worn out or even tiresome bodies, with your "content" downloaded to the new body. If you're murdered, a clone is grown and "you" are restored from backup. Further, the economic society is now reputation-based, with credits ("Whuffie") accumulating based on good and cooperative behavior in the Bitchun Society, and antisocial behavior costing the user Whuffie, which can be seen by anyone looking at you as a readout if they look above your head, thanks to the electronic brain interface built into the clones. It could make a ponderous and pompous sort of intellectual sci-fi book, but instead Doctorow weaves an engaging first person narrative, with the protagonist a 100 year old man who has "recycled" only four times, the latest taking place at the start of the book when he is murdered.

The protagonist has taken up residence at Disney World and helps maintain Liberty Square and the Haunted Mansion. A rival group takes over the Hall of Presidents and threatens to take the Haunted Mansion as well. Underhanded deeds make it hard to maintain reputational currency, but sometimes they must be done.

Doctorow does a nice job of exploring options available in such a society. You can choose your age look: a 50-year-old can be "19 apparent" and a younger doctor could appear to be a wizened septuagenarian. You could "deadhead" by making a backup and killing yourself with a "wakeup call" set for years, decades, or centuries in the future. What are the implications for your family for this kind of decision? What does it say about whether you care for them or find them interesting to be around? You can do something evil and then kill yourself and restore from a backup and not even remember it. You can forget to backup and have an "old version" of yourself as the only restore option, one that perhaps does not know your current love--or that she has dumped you.

The story alone is a really imaginative one, and the "science" is explained only as narrative, revealing itself as it needs to.

I finished this on 3/4/13. I got it from the library. I've read good things about Doctorow before, and when Seth Godin mentioned him in his blog recently, I added this book to my library queue.