Daemon by David Suarez

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jacket blurb: Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can't always be said for the people who design them.

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company's stock price. But Sobol's fans aren't the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it's up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy—or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .

Read for March book group.

Oh heaven's. I had a hard time putting this down. This just hit all my happy buttons - a splash of speculative near-future science fiction, a healthy perception of being a mystery, solid characters fighting against the ghost in the machine, all leaving a person with the feeling that yeah, this could happen.

That being said, aspects of this were…gross. Motorcycle guy clutching his neck as he bleeds out, the club scene was just flat out disturbing (not saying it doesn’t happen…), and guys getting fried to a crisp, and other graphic scenes rather squicked me out and detracted from an otherwise very engaging story.

Since this book has been out for a while, I’m probably going to repeat what others have said:

I thought this had a strong and engrossing plot. I liked how there was one main thread, and then other characters were slowly interwoven in to show the reader just how pervasive the Deamon had become.

I felt the characters were all interesting, each playing to some unique strength that really pulled the story line together.

The gaming tie-in felt reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, Earnest Cline, or William Gibson.

I liked how this made me think about how something of this nature could happen and would your average person even realize the world was being run by a computer program, a bunch of carefully constructed algorithms (not an AI, big difference here)? Would your average person even care? As long as they still had Wifi access and could play games and music, probably not.

An observation and this is only because I feel I’ve been overly inundated with young females fighting against some futuristic dystopian government entity, of warrior women standing behind their king or fighting the Nazis, that there was an interesting lack of females in this book - the disturbing club scene, the FBI computer agent, the wife and the mistress.  Not complaining, just something I noticed.  
My biggest complaint was the ending – a serious W.T.F?

Recommended if you like speculative science fiction.

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