Really well written book. I highly recommend this book to fans of William Gibson's work. ( )

Daemon breaks new ground for a tech thriller with the enemy coming in the form of a distributed network. Although such concepts are not entirely new, popularised back in the '90s with The Lawnmower Man, Daemon is a very different approach. This is evidently a labour of love, with great characterisation, engaging and realistic high-tech scenarios and a shifting balance of power which captivates the reader. Suarez scores with his narrative style too. It's short, punchy and easy to understand, even when the technology gets geeky. There are a myriad of dead-ends and awesome twists, which in other hands would create disbelief, however here they add to the sense of realism. It's far out fiction, with a great finale. A welcome debut novel. ( )

This debut novel has been compared to the works of Crichton, Clancy, and Stephenson, and for good reason. After a genius software developer dies, he unleashes a daemon (a multifunction computer program) that reacts to certain news stories. There's an incredible amount of technology (and a bit of techno-babble: the author explains the important things, but a few things are thrown in there for the true geeks as in-jokes) as the daemon begins its takeover of the financial sector. Yet there's an overarching theme of how prevalent technology is in our lives, which makes one wonder how we could prevent a techno-virus without using the Internet, phones, or TV and radio.

Sure, there are a few weaknesses in the book. There's a death-penalty case that ends within eight months of the crime. There's a house with more booby-traps than in all the Indiana Jones movies put together (after you finish the chapter, you wonder how the guy who lived there could move from room to room). There are characters that appear for a chapter, never to reappear; other characters that seem to be "throwaways" keep reappearing. And while artificial intelligence is always improving in the real world, the AI in the story is almost omnipotent. But the breath-taking pace of the book forces you to skip over these points and suspend disbelief to see what happens next. While the ending isn't completely satisfying (there's a bit of wrap-up, but enough is left for the planned sequel), you won't feel as though you've wasted your time on this novel, especially if you're a gamer. ( )

An entertaining read from the computer-takes-over-the-world genre by a first-time author. Some novel ideas. The plot is--not surprisingly--a little rough around the edges, but it would be a good beach read. Short bibliography included. ( )

I just read a really good book called Daemon by Daniel Suarez (his first novel) about what someone could do if they had amazing control of the internet, a lot of free time and lots of money

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.

The story is incredibly fast. There are no slow parts. There is lots of plot, lots of detail and many characters. It's similar to a Michael Crichton novel except better. More accurate stories, more realistic, more detailed, more interesting characters.

The book is a cross between The Stand and The Matrix, two of the epics of our time. Like The Matrix, technology plays a central role in this story, and like the former, it about what happens to the people who are trying to cope with the world changing all around them.

This is not a masterful piece of literature. It's book candy and really tasty. ( )