Customer Reviews

Daemon

5 star:		(166)
4 star:		(81)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

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

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!

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!

As others have said here, this book has a strong beginning. It then abandons a main character in mid-game, so to speak. In the end, other main characters are just suspended or left to literally drift away or simply lifted off stage in a helicopter with no explanation as to what happens/happened next. The climax isn't, and the wrap-up is weak and then, as an afterthought, the author adds text that seems to beg for a sequel.

This book has a number of wonder reviews on the back by people not otherwise known for their critiques of books. That should say everything one needs to know, but let me provide this further note: this book is like taking a wonderful Sunday drive that ends up with a flat tire ten miles from the closest service station. It is an entertaining read, just don't expect a satisfying conclusion.

Don't get me wrong. I will buy other books by Mr. Suarez and I look forward to his next novel(s). I'm just saving my rave reviews for his next works, which I'm sure will be much better and more accomplished.

I read a lot of thrillers, and it's rare when I find a thriller as smartly written as DAEMON. This novel, which is about a computer program that slowly takes over the world, is clever, well written and filled with creative ideas.

DAEMON reminds me a great deal of the work of the late Michael Crichton. Like Crichton, author Daniel Suarez enjoys discussing the impact of scientific progress on society. There are many eye-opening scenes in this novel where Suarez brilliantly illustrates how much of our lives -- and the global economy -- are now dependent on computer technology. This material is what makes this novel exceptional, although Suarez's painstaking attention to detail sometimes distracts from the story.

Unfortunately, just like Crichton, Suarez falters a bit at characterization. DAEMON is a novel with a large cast of characters, but many of them are at best two-dimensional. Suarez does not seem interested in building his story around a central hero -- instead he constantly shifts perspectives, and relies heavily on a large cast of supporting characters who only appear in the narrative sporadically. This relatively impersonal approach made it difficult for me to relate to the book at an emotional level.

DAEMON also features a rather over-the-top plot that becomes less believable as the story progresses. What begins as a murder mystery eventually evolves into a fight against world domination. While I give Suarez credit for crafting an unconventional storyline, I found myself rolling my eyes at certain plot developments. This isn't a fatal problem, however, because Suarez keeps the plot moving and offers so much interesting material. Readers who dislike graphic violence and sex, however, should look elsewhere -- there's quite a bit of both in this novel.

One last warning -- DAEMON is not a complete novel and therefore does not offer a true ending. If you want to see how the story resolves, you'll have to read the recently published sequel, which I hope to read later this year.

Overall, however, this book is a well-crafted effort, and worth your time.

Part 1 of the book deals with murders and attacks committed by a daemon program against a few individuals. It's fun to read because it uses today's IT technology and the author gets nearly everything (in terms of IT technology) right. It's interesting to see what you can accomplish using today's technology, but since it's a just murder case, so no big deal here.

Part 2 and 3 jumps a few months ahead, and describes a new world order being established by a computer program which is gradually taken over major companies and recruits an army of hackers and misfits. This is interesting in terms of big ideas, and there're a lot of actions. However, if you stop and think about it, there's no way the daemon program in part 1 can accomplish the actions in part 2/3.

I think this discontinuity is the bigest problem of this book, part 2/3 is not hard to swallow on its own since this is SciFi after all, but putting this together with the realism in part 1 doesn't work well if you have some knowledge of IT technology.

Some other observations: 1. The monologue on parasites in part 2 is self defeating when applied to the daemon program in part 1, the daemon would be dead meat when faced with evolution. 2. It's unbelievable that after a year or so, no hacker has been able to hack the daemon itself from inside and use it to his/her advantage. It happens all the time in computer gaming.

As a technology professional, it always bugs me when I see technology portrayed in books, movies, an television in ways that are completely unrealistic. Daemon is the answer to this problem. While highly improbably, and logistically infeasible, the technology in the book is absolutely real. I found only one thing in the entire book that was only slightly technologically off kilter. He didn't have to be so realistic with the tech. either, since it is a work of fiction, but he did.

Now that alone isn't going to interest most people in this book. What I think is really great about it are the action scenes. They are described so wonderfully, I could clearly see all of the action in my head. I felt like I was watching Die Hard, it was so great.

If you like technology. If you like action. If you like being scared by the possibility of a techno-dystopian future, then check this out.

OK, I read this book almost two years ago in its first printing. You can tell by the author's name that was on the front cover - Leinad Zeraus. The next printing in hardcover (following its success) has his proper name on the cover. I mentioned to Mr. Suarez that I planned to write review following a talk he gave at the Long Now Foundation in August, 2008. I had read the book several months previously after Peter Schwartz (GBN) recommended it to me. It was easy to become engrossed in the book and the story, particularly if you have been involved with the growth of the Internet, virtual worlds, software development, wireless technology, and, of course, video games. I could put a check mark by each of those so I naturally read the story with the skeptical eye of the `insider' looking for both insights I hadn't put together yet and the attempts to stretch the truth too far. After all, we are talking about software bots taking over a chunk of the world through the Internet. How real is this possibility, now or in, say, this century?

I'll give you my short answer. Not Today, of course, but . . . it's worth taking a look further out. After all, don't we have a DOD Cyber (security) Command now?

First, I would say that Daemon is a technology tour de force in terms of the technologies that are mentioned. I took to making a list in a second reading of the book and here is a sampling -

Rootkit, Wireless Internet, Spread Spectrum RFI (radio frequency interference), Dark Net, Hack Test, Robot Humvees (think DARPA Grand Challenges as a real world - it works!), automated voice response (AVR), ULF (ultra low frequency) acoustical weapon, UHFA (ultra high frequency acoustical) pin-point sound, steganography, fuel-air bomb, fiber optic cameras, crystal door keys, SQL injection attack, UWB (ultra wideband) receiver, MRI mind mapping, multinational web crime groups, DDOS (direct denial of service) attacks, and my list goes on for another page and a half.

Second, as a technologist I found that most of the uses of technology are reasonably credible save towards the end when you must park the skeptical brain off to one side for a while. Early on, for example, you can imagine a fuel-air bomb created by forcing fuel through a lawn sprinkler system. And only a real fuel-air bomb designer could share the bits of `art' that are essential to get the explosion described in the story. On the other hand, towards the end when bullet spitting robot cycles race through a control complex and attack protagonists in the open, well, maybe I'm skeptical today. But there are also numerous robot companies developing lethal autonomous-capable machines for military action, so much so, that a robot ethics code for such machines is a new topic of research. We are beyond Isaac Asimov's Three Laws.

Third, there are parts I found intriguing like the infamous Heinrich Boerner in the video game virtual environment and how he leads our protagonist Jon Ross further into the conflict between the bots and humanity. As a casual gamer, the description of that was definitely in sync with how one might engage in a multiplayer online game. I did find some parts disturbing such as how our social media can be abused by propagating embarrassing events to a global audience. We can be cruel in our self-gratification but what is new there?

All-in-all I found Daemon to be a thought provoking novel about technology and mankind. If you follow Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity concept, this will give you another possible story line of how our distributed AI offspring might both bite the hand that created it and, hopefully, help us overcome our inherent bounded rationality. I recommend reading the novel and listening to Daniel Suarez's talk on the Long Now Foundation website. And I hear there are plans for a movie. I'll be among the first in line I suspect.

I picked this up last week looking for some light entertainment out of my normal genre of fantasy and was very surprised by just how much I liked it. The book is entertaining, fast paced; believable enough to where it almost makes me unplug my Internet connection.
This book is an excellent start to a writing career that I look forward to following. I will be marking the sequel down as a must have.
This is a techno thriller portraying a type of Internet doomsday. Although there are a lot of hi-tech things portrayed within the book it does not require you to be an IT expert to understand. The author has done a great job and this book should appeal to the technology expert and us everyday readers as well.

I finished this book, which was recommended to me, a little while ago, and I have a feeling it will be with me for days, or weeks, as I continue to replay the story in my mind.

Daniel Suarez' novel, Daemon, opens with an obituary (several key words and phrases are highlighted) and launches into a murder investigation. A key developer at CyberStorm Entertainment, the company that created two of the most popular games on the internet, has been found dead. That death is followed quickly by another, where an important employee of CyberStorm is electrocuted in spectacular fashion. Detective Sebeck, with the assistance of Jon Ross, a computer security expert, determines that the killer used the internet for both of the deaths. But the trail keeps pointing to a dead man, Matthew Sobol, whose obituary starts the novel, as the one responsible. Could he have created a daemon, a computer program that lies dormant until a specified condition occurs, that is now active on the internet? Further, what is the purpose of the daemon? Detective Sebeck's beliefs are tested, as he is not a gamer nor very technical, while he investigates and attempts to stop the daemon before there are serious global implications.

Suarez has written a thrilling and technically accurate novel that will appeal to people inside and outside of computer circles. If you are a fan of MMORPG, then there is a lot in this book that will interest you. Be patient as you read, as the first several chapters setup the characters and you will be introduced to quite a few. But then the story really picks up the pace, the characters become more familiar, and the story pulls you in. If you are worried that you won't understand the computer jargon, Detective Sebeck is in the same boat and the characters will explain the technical aspects to both Sebeck and you. This technique really adds to the book, as you realize that even veteran computer professionals aren't versed in all aspects of information technology. Daemon is Suarez' first novel, but it doesn't feel that way. Fast paced action, excellent premise, well developed characters, and believable dialog add up to an exceptional read. This is an excellent debut, one that deserves your time and attention. He weaves a tale that is based on fact, and may even motivate you to double check your wireless access points and the security on your workstations, While 2009 is only a month old, this book has made my list of Best Books for the year.