Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom is in bookstores today. In keeping with the open source tradition, you can also download the whole flipping thing, as well as check up onn ews, reviews, press and whatnot on the book at Cory's site .

Here's a little bio on Cory:

Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach.

Doctorow's publisher, Tor, recently bought John Scalzi's sci-fi novel after reading it on the Internet. Cool.

Blogcritic Kevin Marks, of mediAgora fame, reviewed the book in these pages last November:

About once every ten years, a Science Fiction novel appears that redefines the art form. One that describes a world different from our own, but recognisably ours - extrapolated from current trends, but richly evocative of its difference, adding words to the language that needed to be coined. Books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy,Snow Crash and now Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

What these books have in common are worlds that draw you in and make you believe in the technological underpinnings, accepting them implicitly and learning their terminology (TANSTAAFL, frood, Metaverse, Whuffie) as you go, while you follow the adventures of characters you come to care about.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom takes place in a utopian future, where death has lost its sting, as afterwards you can restore your consciousness from a backup, just like an adventure game. Corporations, Governments and money have disappeared, replaced by Ad-hocracies and Whuffie, a distributed reputation system....