Ahhh Disney! Capable of making me lose my breakfast, yet also able to produce some quite nifty filmic treats, like the recently released ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’.

Whatever your thoughts on Disney, very few people have escaped its influence in the modern age and most of us have childhood memories imprinted with images of dancing brooms and big flappy-eared elephants. Good or bad Disney is a fact of life.

For Jules, the narrator of this novel, Disney is the fact of life. Jules lives in the not too distant future where death has been cured and the evils of poverty and misery have been erased. Cue the typical SF consequences of this particular societal development, namely big chunks of apathy with a side order of existential despair. Fear not though, this book treats its subject with an admirable subtlety and the sense of desperation conjured by the description of the Bitchun Society is more of an undercurrent in a book packed full of humour and dramatic interest.

We follow Jules in his life at Disney World where he 'works' with his girlfriend Lil, maintaining the rides and manipulating them slightly to provide the best experience for the public that visits the ageing attractions. Jules is nearly a century old but has the body of a much younger man as this is a society where cybernetic implants in the brain allow the storage of memories and personalities that can then be subsequently downloaded into clones, eliminating age and death.

The implants also allow the citizens of this culture to be in permanent contact with each other and to be linked constantly to massive flow of information. It also provides for the constant calculation of 'Whuffie', a measurement of how much respect you have from your fellow citizens at any one particular point in time. This Whuffie rating has replaced the money system of the previous society as in a world with few limits, material wealth means little.

In the early stages of the novel, Jules meets up with Dan, an old university friend, who used to have piles of Whuffie. He accumulated it in several successful missions to recruit reticent communities into the Bitchun Society. When Jules finds him, Dan is Whuffie poor as this type of missionary work has almost completely dried up.

Dan is contemplating suicide until Lil persuades him to build up his Whuffie again before pulling the trigger, allowing him to go out with a bang that is metaphorical as well as literal. Dan does this by aiding Jules in his crusade against Debra, an ambitious woman who is not only trying to take over Jules' beloved rides, but also quite possibly may have had him assassinated. Understandably this leaves Jules just the slightest bit peeved with her.

‘Magic Kingdom’ is a great speculative novel. Sure there isn't that much in the actual ideas presented that add up to anything strikingly new but it is in their careful combination and the skilful way that they are woven into the Bitchun Society’s fabric that Doctorow has scored a real triumph.

The book is designed simply, with key relationships being established with an economy of words that leads to a reading experience that I found immensely refreshing, accomplishing in approximately two hundred pages what other novels take four hundred to do. I must be becoming used to reading doorstops as the mid-point climax hit me like the slap of an enraged fat woman, unexpected and full of reverberation.

Doctorow uses the technology of the Bitchun Society to highlight several still relevant philosophical questions. The use of clones leads to the familiar debate about identity and how it is constituted. The availability of information highlights the cheapness and speed of modern culture and the author creates interesting situations obviously reflective of todays burgeoning Internet culture (personally I think anyone who writes for the Internet has got to be a bit weird, best to stay well clear of that lot). Similarly the length of time people have to live (eternity if they'd prefer) raises a questioning finger at art and literature and its relative worth.

Jules has already composed three symphonies and this seems to be a rather offhand and average thing rather than an indication of genius. The central struggle in the plot concerns technology or rather, technology and nostalgia. Is holding on to traditional methods simply backward thinking or are we wrong to accept every modern advancement as being 'better'.

‘Magic Kingdom’ manages to pack all of these notions into an involving tale of obsession and betrayal whilst at the same time providing several wonderfully black-tinged comedic moments. It would have been nice to have had the Bitchun Society fleshed out a little more and as mentioned previously the ideas presented never quite manage to reach revolutionary status. These are minor criticisms however in a book that is easily jumping up my top ten of this year's best SF reads.

Also praise must be heaped on Doctorow who has made available the entire text of this novel, completely unabridged and absolutely free on his website. This is a virtually unprecedented move in a book intended for commercial publication. Doctorow is confident that once you've read a few chapters or even the whole novel that you will purchase a proper copy of the book. I see no reason to suggest that this confidence is in any way unfounded.

Paul Skevington