Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [Assessment]

Why is your reaction to the text you just read? 

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has addressed some interesting notions of a world without the fear or death and a world without the quibbles of money. Instead the idea of Whuffie is something I feel was a nice addition to the world as the more people respect you the more Whuffies you receive, a form of wealth. Additionally, because death is obsolete, the idea of treating your body like a computer where you can back up and restore your memories into cloned bodies of yourself helps create a unique conflict that could be possibly come up later on in the novel regarding overpopulation. With talking about population and removing any desire to work for money, work in the world is from what I see, voluntary and instead have ad-hoc groups that work on specific things. I feel the author has removed a lot of the excess attributes of his world that would get muddled up in the store and just focus on the main character, Julius’s dreams of living in the Magic Kingdom. 

 
What connection did you make with the story? Discuss the elements of the story with which you were able to connect. 

I automatically related to Julius as a character for his love and dreams of living in the Magic Kingdom. I also love the rules of the world set up by the author where the fear of death is obsolete. The ideas of being able to unload memories onto the net is something similar to using the cloud in today’s era of technology. My love of theme parks and technology in the future is tightly bound together in this novel and if given time would like to know what happens in the end. 

 
What Medium would you use? What changes would you make? 

I feel this science fiction novel would translate perfectly into a series of seasons for a television show, similar to West World. The idea of the setting taking place in a theme park automatically makes it very contained with clear rules for that world, from which then you can start to elaborate the specifics rules of the characters and what kind of society they live in. Changes I would make would probably be to make the main character Julius’s motives more clear and apparent and clear. The introduction of the characters is misleading and often slow, I would have rather dropped audiences right into the action and go from there.