The Great Geek Manual

Book: Daemon
ISBN-13: 978-0441016747

Author: Daniel Suarez
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Genre: Cyber Punk/Techno Thriller
Release: January 8, 2009
Length: 448 (Hardcover)

Verdict

I was completely blown away by what I’m assuming is destined to be the next cyberpunk classic. Anyone who fashions themselves a computer geek or hardcore gamer will love this book.

This fast-paced techno-thriller features the car chases and gadgets of a Bond novel, the suspense-building puzzles of a Dan Brown novel, the science of a Michael Crichton novel, the plot-centric pacing and broad cast of characters of a Tom Clancy novel, and the foresight of a Neal Stephenson novel. It’s that good.

Synopsis

When legendary computer game designer Matthew Sobol dies after a prolonged struggle with cancer, his death triggers a wide-reaching and swift-moving chain of events that spans the globe, all coordinated by a massively distributed software network. The incidents begin with the apparently accidental death of a game programmer and escalate into a mass of terrorist cells that hold the world’s leading businesses hostage. Now, a former mafia hacker turned IT freelancer, a SWAT team leader, and an NSA agent may be the only people capable of preventing Sobol’s daemon from ushering in a new world order.

Official: 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…

Review

I put off reading this book for months because I couldn’t get past the synopsis. The quickest way for a book or movie to loose my interest is by tossing around a lot of real-world tech terminology used in absurdly fantastical contexts, so I rarely pick up anything from the sci-fi genre set in the near future. However, I was finally sold when I tuned into an interview in which Suarez explained that, as an IT professional himself, he had made a point of using only real-world technologies throughout the book.

As a devoted gadget-junkie, I immediately knew I had to read the book. Science fiction set in the modern day, using modern technology? I thought it was a great hook, especially given the speculation that has been circulation across the blogosphere that science fiction is dying out because readers are becoming so jaded by the rapid advancement of real-world technology. So I snagged myself a copy and six hours later, found myself torn between putting the book down so that I would have enough left to satisfy me the next day or staying up through the night to finish it.

Forget your fears about one massive super-intelligent computer enslaving humanity. Suarez paints a portrait of a world already enslaved by a thousand tiny system – our world.

Suarez, a senior IT consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, weaves his technical know-how into every page of the book to construct a global tech conspiracy one cog at a time, and in so doing, his characters plausibly pass from raves to corporate boardrooms without ever breaking the Steven Segull-pacing of the story. Along the way, readers, whether novices or hardcore web-heads are introduced to an astonishing (but not disruptive) array of higher technologies, including extra-sensory suits, gunshot detectors, laser-guided plasma weapons, and more, all wielded by a terrorist organization organized and directed by a massively distributed software program as if its individual members were gamers in one of the world’s most popular MMORPGs.

Is the whole story far-fetched? Yes, but only when considered on the whole. Each component and concept of the book, is in itself, not only viable, but frighteningly plausible.

If that were the entire substance of the book, it might be worth a read to James Bond fans and the like, but that’s just the beginning. Suarez proves himself a geek through and through and true to his roots when he takes what might have been the action novel of the year and uses as a stage for an examination of some of the weightiest philosophic debates currently being waged by technologists. Among the issues that arise are the right to privacy, botnet warfare, the wisdom of building self-perpetuating technologies, the increasing dependence of large companies upon automated technologies, and the growing culture of disenfranchised, tech-saavy youth. He then goes on to ask whether our current governments can evolve to handle the increasing power of the individual power or whether a geopolitical revolution is inevitable.

Apart from all of it’s intellectual virtues, however, Daemon is definitely a plot-driven work. With a cast as expansive as any to ever populate an epic fantasy, Suarez tells his stories in a rapid series of brief scenes that keep the story from dragging and the reading from identifying too strongly with either side of the story’s conflict.

Technology, philosophy, mystery, cautionary tale, or action. This book is one of those rare few that can pack them all without loosing a reader’s attention or digressing into wild, meandering monologues (”Frank Herbert” style) or heavy-handed info dumps. But it’s difficult to assign the book to a single genre other than “intellectual.”

I highly recommend picking this book up. It’s a thought-provoking novel that does a fantastic job of incorporating technical elements that will leave geeks raptly attentive without ruining the story for the non-technical readers. Thumbs up across the board!

Similar Books

• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
• Neuromancer by William Gibson

Further Information

The author’s Wikiquote page.
The novel’s official website.
The novel’s Wikipedia page.
The official website of the book’s publisher.
Suarez’s lecture: Bot-Mediated Reality.