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96 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Better than Crichton, a Bright New Star, January 4, 2009
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For a first novel, this one is pretty good. Others have summarized it, but there are a few details missing, so I will make a few points. This book is about few really central characters, but a cast of a dozen or so important characters, including the titular Daemon. It tells the precautionary story of what can happen when a very bright person gets very angry with society. Or perceives it to have outlasted its usefulness. Choose your poison. Matthew Sobol, the best game designer in the world, has died. With his death, a stunning series of events begins to take place, starting with the deaths of a few programmers, and extending to the endangering of the entire world. Very few people can hope to stop his plan. These include Tripwire Merritt, "Jon Ross", Natalie Phillips, and a certain police detective you meet at the beginning of the book. There were a number of thoughts that went through my head as I read this book. First, it is paced to within an inch of its life. There are no slow parts, there are no parts where the plotting moves too fast and loses detail. Second, this is like Michael Crichton, only better. More accurate stories, more realistic, more detailed, more interesting characters (and more of them). Third, this compares well to The Stand and The Matrix, two of the epics of our time. Like the latter, technology plays a central role in this story, and like the latter, it doesn't end here. The only reason that I don't give this book five stars is that the ending is not complete enough. The last discussion in the book lacks the details, the philosophy, and the explanation, to raise this even further above the bar for techno-thrillers. Instead, it is left for later. The conversation is cryptic, perhaps intentionally, when a little great explication would have been nice. There is little other philosophy in the book, relegating this to a very well written, extremely well plotted and paced, techno-thriller, but not literature. That said, I still have already recommended this book to three people, and I know that all three will read it and at least one of them will buy it. And they will probably recommend it to others. I have only one question: Why has this not been translated into Russian yet? I know that it would sell there, and well. As it says on the novel, buy it, read it, enjoy it, and pray that we don't have to live it. Worth your time and money. B+ Harkius
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most Crichtonesqe novel since Crichton, January 28, 2009
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Few readers were more saddened by the premature death of Michael Crichton than I was. Ever since his death (and truthfully even before it) I'd read any novel that promised to introduce "the next Crichton." Invariably, I'd come away disappointed. Until Daemon. Daniel Suarez's debut novel gave me hope for the future of smart, complex techno-thrillers. What a read! What a find! Thank you, Amazon Vine! Daemon is the story of... Well, it's a little hard to summarize. The catalyst of this novel is the death (from brain cancer) of Matthew Sobol. Sobol is the young, multi-millionaire genius behind a computer gaming empire. Specifically, he made his fortune designing MMORPGs, and if you're like me, you're a reader who doesn't know squat about Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games. That's okay, you'll get educated along the way. So, Matthew Sobol spent a lot of time thinking about society and the world we live in as his death approached, and apparently he found it lacking. Or, perhaps, the tumors in his brain drove him mad. Take your pick. In either case, Sobol set in motion an elaborate plan that would be kicked off, only after a computer read of his obituary in the news. That was the catalyst that released the eponymous computer daemon into the world. For those that don't know (i.e. me), a daemon is a process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events. And that's precisely what Sobol's Daemon does. The obituary triggers the murders of some of the programmers that took part in the daemon's creation--in quite creative ways, I might add. And that is literally the start of the novel, and how we get introduced to homicide detective Peter Sebeck. Pete is our everyman, the one who asks the questions about technology so that the reader doesn't have to. And initially, it seemed that Sebeck would be the protagonist of a fairly typical police procedural. I could not have been more wrong. First, rather than have a single (or a few) protagonists and antagonists, Suarez tells his tale with an ever-expanding cast. It's very hard to tell who will be a major character and who will make a brief appearance, never to be seen again. And even among the more major characters, don't get too attached, because no one is safe in this novel. This daemon is playing for keeps. Through the computer attacks, it is almost as if Sobol still lives (all the while begging the question: How do you punish a dead man?). He makes phone calls. He sends videos. And he punishes anyone who gets in the way of his destructive plans. He also rewards those who help him, because even the most powerful computers in the world need occasional human henchmen. The way Sobol recruits from among society's disgruntled and disenfranchised reminded me so much of Randall Flagg in Stephen King's The Stand that I'm inclined to believe it's Suarez's homage to the man. I found it a little hard to believe how many people were willing to sell their soul to the daemon, but what do I know. Interestingly, none of the heroes in this novel is all good, and none of the villains is all bad. It certainly made for more interesting reading. Sometimes I couldn't even figure out who the good guys were. Crichton has long been criticized for writing underdeveloped characters. Suarez, quite frankly, isn't even trying to develop many of the characters, sometimes populating entire chapters with characters notated only by the agencies they represent: CIA, FBI, NSA, DARPA, and so on. The stakes in this novel certainly do expand beyond the Thousand Oaks Police Department. The daemon is an enormous, world-wide danger. The pace of this novel is relentless, and more than a few plot twists took me completely by surprise, including an enormous shocker in the final pages. The novel comes to a satisfying enough conclusion, but quite a few threads are left unresolved. I was sort of okay with the things left up in the air--food for thought, you know--but Publisher's Weekly promises a sequel. I am so there!
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43 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thrilling, chilling, high tech roller coaster ride, January 2, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
If you know even just a little about AI, encryption, computer networks, gaming and internet technology you're going to LOVE this book. This is one of those books that's a wild ride right from the beginning, a page turner that you can't put down even late into the night when you really should be sleeping. This WILL keep you awake. Every time you start to put it down, the next 'big thing' occurs and you just have to find out the outcome. It starts out with an obituary on Matthew Sobol, a top computer game designer who's designed a half dozen games and he leaves behind kind of a super game in the form of a daemon that scans internet obituaries and news articles for keywords that trigger a world changing sequence of events. A detective, Peter Sebeck, who is investigating a pair of Internet-related homicides and Jon Ross, who is trying to help his company battle a virus become involved in trying to stop this destructive force from causing irreparable damage to the world. Anyone involved or interested in online gaming and virtual environments should find the technology aspect of this book especially intriguing. The plot revolves around an online game where it becomes a fine line between a virtual world and the material one. I understand that this is the first book by Daniel Suarez and that he published it under another name, Leinad Zeraus, a little over a year ago. He's an amazing writer and has another book in the works for next year. This one reads like you're watching a movie. You know how you can see the characters interacting and watch the action unfolding as you read some books? This is like that. It reminded me of a high tech Michael Crichton novel. It's based on real technology, some that you probably know about or have heard of, and some that will have you Googling to figure out what he's talking about. It's high action, suspenseful, and just a thrilling ride from beginning to end and will leave you asking yourself, "Could something like this really happen?" I wish I could give this book 6 stars. It's really THAT good!
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Daemon is an ambitious novel, which sets out not only to entertain, which it surely does, but also to challenge the reader to consider social issues as broad as the implications of living in a technologically advanced world and whether democracy can survive in such a world. 
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