Daemon

Boah, was für ein Buch! Aber gleich vorweg: Leute, die mit IT nichts am Hut haben, Netzwerke für Ausrüstungsgegenstände von Fischern halten und die Faszination von Computerspielen nicht mal ansatzweise nachvollziehen können, sollten die Finger davon lassen.
Nun zum Inhalt: Mathew Sobol, milliardenschweres Computergenie, erliegt Anfang 30 einem Gehirntumor. Just in diesem Augenblick sterben auf mysteriöse Art und Weise Mitarbeiter seiner Firma und bald wird klar, dass Sobol dahinter steckt. Bei der Untersuchung der Morde erkennen die Ermittler, dass ein von Sobol programmiertes Programm (der Daemon) dafür verantwortlich ist, doch sie sind nicht in der Lage die wahren Dimensionen einzuschätzen. Detective Pete Sebeck beginnt show more gemeinsam mit einem undurchsichtigen IT-Consultant Untersuchungen auf eigene Faust durchzuführen und findet sich bald in einem Netz aus Anschuldigungen und Vorwürfen wieder, aus denen es kein Entrinnen zu geben scheint. Unterdessen baut der Daemon ein weltweit verzweigtes Netz auf: Er infiltriert Firmen, manipuliert die Presse, rekrutiert neue Mitstreiter und falls notwendig, lässt er dafür Menschen umbringen. Niemand scheint ihn stoppen zu können...
Was diesen Thriller so beklemmend macht, ist, dass das Szenario, so utopisch es auch klingen mag, auf der Grundlage der heutigen Möglichkeiten durchaus vorstellbar wäre. Die ganze Welt hängt an einem Netz und wer sich dessen bemächtigt, hat die Macht - nicht nur virtuell. Diese Erkenntnis setzt sich in Sobols Buch nur langsam durch, für die Befehlshaber der 'letzten Generation' sind Hacker nur Gesindel, das (Zitat) 'zusammengetrieben und erschossen gehört.' Es ist ein Kampf zweier Generationen: Die, die nur in der realen Welt zuhause ist und die, für die die virtuelle Welt längst eine echte Heimat darstellt.
Suarez zeigt auf, wo und was überall manipuliert werden kann, kaum etwas ist noch sicher vor Zugriffen aus dem Netz (da fällt mir ein: Ich brauch' unbedingt ein neues Virenprogramm..). Spannend und überraschend, selbst eine Mini-Liebesgeschichte hat es in die Story geschafft - ein wirklich packender Thriller.
Vier Punkte gibt es 'nur', da die Verwendung von IT-Begriffen manchmal extreme Ausmaße annimmt: 'Er wollte einen schnellen Exploit, der ihm eine Remote Shell auf den Host mit Sysadmin-Rechten lieferte.' Das Buch ist auch ohne Verständnis dieser Fachausdrücke gut zu verstehen, aber etwas weniger (oder zumindest ein Anhang) wäre doch deutlich mehr gewesen. show less

Me, several months ago, to various websites: What science fiction mysteries are good? I have a hankering.

All of those websites: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez! You will love it! It is the BEST and SHINIEST.

Those websites were wrong in every particular. This is not a mystery; it's a thriller. (You know who committed the crimes by 10%, but also you know if you read the summary.) I did not love it. And it is not good, never mind best.

I will say, though, that it is in some ways clever. It was written a decade and a half ago and doesn't feel hugely dated yet, which is an impressive feat, given that it is about computer technology and set in its own present. And it is absolutely paced correctly; Suarez definitely does know how to write at the show more thriller pace, and he knows how to recount a plot.

Unfortunately, that is absolutely all he's doing here; he's reporting on a plot he thought up. The characters in this cast of thousands are almost all interchangeable, the interactions between them are either nonexistent or shallow, and almost every single character is an asshole (and the rest are mostly psychopaths). That last part isn't all bad, though; most of the characters die, and even though those deaths are generally very graphically described (this is THE book to read if you want lots of details of blood spatter), I never once felt sad or even mildly distressed about it. I was too busy trying to remember which Stoic Man this was, or which Miscellaneous Tech Bro I could mentally knock off the character list. (This is what happens when you have many, many characters, most of whom have no personalities; no one gives a shit about them.) I was, however, a little bit sad when one of the characters turned out not to be dead; I had been glad to see him go, and then he came BACK, which I guess I should have expected. The villains never die the first time, and virtually every character in this on both sides is a villain.

But, hey, better to be a Dead Miscellaneous Tech Bro Villain in this book than any woman at all. There's a scene of graphically, happily described gang rape of a woman who gets no name beyond "Jennifer," apparently included just for funsies. There's the public humiliation of one of the two actual female characters (this one's stereotype is Spoiled Bitch, but I'm not complaining about the one-note stereotype characterization, since most of the characters don't have anything else). And there's the blinding of the other female character. Suarez doesn't really give speaking parts to the rest of the countable-on-the-fingers-of-one-hand women in this cast of thousands, but he does make sure we know they're all super hot! Like. Every woman is just SUPER hot. Which makes sense, because they're largely there as objects of male desire, so if they weren't super hot, what would be the point of even having them be women? (No, no assessment is made about hotness of the men, but then, they have actual plot functions, and literally no human is ever attracted to a man anyway, right?)

I realize I'm making this sound gross, but it's actually much grosser when you read it.

I also wonder if any of this book makes sense, because when it hit up against something I knew, I was like, uh, that is actually incorrect? That is not how that works at all? And I guess I just lost a lot of faith in Suarez's realism (and his factcheckers, if any) when he had a dude hooked up to an IV and bound to a bed for 46 hours *without a catheter* and it was not a problem in any way.

Fun additional bonus: if you do read this book, enjoy the not-ending! Because it literally doesn't have one. It resolves exactly zero of its plot threads and leaves most of them in Big Action Moments. Suarez wrote THE END at the end because he knew otherwise all of his readers would call the publisher to complain that they got shorted some chapters in their copy.

Ugh. I love science fiction mysteries. But they have to be BETTER THAN THIS SHIT. show less

I've just become a huge fanboy with one book.

That's to say I was rightly blown away. :) All right. To explain. What first seems like a techno-thriller with gamers and programmers and a murderer doing all his murders after his own death by cancer then quickly turns into a social and economical exploration based on the trends we're now facing.

This is a fun and complicated story filled with many twists and turns, awesome characters, and a world-changing creation that turns us all into players in a world-wide socio-economic game based on distributed network theory and game-development strategies. You know that little military idea of Game Theory? Why not take it to an All New Level and create for ourselves a Game Of Our Lives, so pervasive show more a virus and lucrative for all the players that it takes over every level of government, corporation, and home? It's like having the mafia become a super genius living in every computer and taking over everything purely by social hacking. It's beautiful.

I've seen a number of somewhat similar tales grace the page, but most of those are social hacking through social media. This one is a bit more fundamental than that. This one leaves us all alone unless it has something it needs, in conjunction with so many other people-pieces, that when they're put together, create major changes without anyone knowing exactly what was up until it happened. A computer god or Microsoft Design Strategy. Whatever. It's gorgeous.

And so strange that the novel still keeps up with it's techno-thriller ride, still managing a wonderful story while also exploring the depths of an entirely plausible and scary takeover of the world. :) By AI.

I totally recommend this fantastic SF. It is both fun and important for the field. :) Solid as hell and a pure delight, even with some of the more disturbing social aspects intact. No one is innocent. That's kinda the point. We deserve to be taken over by a computer parasite. :) show less

Breathtaking thriller that seems to be about the dangers of our interconnected world and our vulnerability in light of our reliance on networked computers and the internet. But by the end, I think it's about the dangers of corporatism, and techies wreaking havoc look like the good guys (even if they don't hesitate to create lots of collateral damage).

I was exhausted when I finished the book. I liked the idea of the Daemon that could exert so much control technilogically, while I could have done without its ability to control killer, self-propelled automobiles that assert control a little too directly to feel I could suspend disbelief.

Fast paced and fun. I'm a slow reader, but this was like watching a movie. I was always dying to know the next plot twist. It made me think about how dependence makes us vulnerable to exploitation. And we're all dependent on something: income, family, technology, privacy, security, etc. Like good Sci-Fi, it also made me think about the limits of technology and its ubiquity.

I wanted to like it more. I didn't get the villain's motivation and it didn't seem to tie all his plans together. Maybe the next book explains more. Did he really think the inevitable social evolution would require so much violent coercion? Did he really think saving a corrupt world requires so many innocent deaths.

I know this is Sci-Fi, but I couldn't suspend show more disbelief with some parts and other parts seemed thin. Intelligence agencies were chronically shortsighted, and only decisive in retreat. And the hardcore, "leet", pierced, hacker-gamer-criminal-footsoldiers. Gag. And would such a vast conspiracy of losers really be so well contained? And the AI that somehow flawlessly exploits human psychology. I don't know. show less

One of the best-written books I've read in a very long time.

The summary ... Matthew Sobol, a genius software developer who runs the largest gaming company in the world dies, causing a bunch of his employees to die in mysterious freak circumstances. A old not-technical police sergeant winds up investigating the case, and uncovers that Sobol's death triggered a incredibly complex piece of software ... the Daemon ... which is setting forth Sobol's genius plan to take the world in a new direction, no matter what cost.

This is a novel which could have become very hokey, but to his credit Daniel Suarez is an amazingly crisp writer given that this is apparently his first novel. The novel itself starts off as a murder mystery and is a good one show more to boot notwithstanding the subject matter. The scape increases to scale with the stakes of the story, but my favourite parts were in the first half of the book, where the technological savviness of the villain is counterpoint nicely by the "can barely use a computer" protagonist.

Speaking of technology, being a computer scientist I am usually disappointed when authors try to shoehorn technology into their plots (as I'm sure anyone versed in a field has to suffer when their field is the basis of a pop culture work) ... but beyond the scale of the story, every technological moment seems well-researched and respectful to technology.

What _isn't_ as respectful is the male-gaze that runs through the book. The book has a particular chapter which cruelly explicitly details the exploitation of a girl being being drugged and filmed in sexually compromising acts to introduce the evilness of a character, and in general the amount of stressing that that character cares little for life and enjoys inflicting violence on other people gets tiring and exploitative in its own right. The romances in this book seem incredibly shoehorned even if not entirely gratuitous, but with one exception (not knowing anything about the sequels) women become romantic candy with no depth to those relationships even though it's clear that Suarez could write compelling and strong women characters when he puts his mind to it. Relationship nuance between characters was not Suarez' strong at the time this book was written, anyway.

This is a book about hackers ultimately, which means a lot of the nerd ethos that is both its charm and its flaws show up here. The book implicitly espouses that kind of hacker cowboy can-do-anything-if-you're-smart-enough libertarianism that irks, although to its credit the book is quite happy to tell you how unsavoury its characters can be.

The second half of the book plays less with the contrast of nontechnical man vs. machine, though I still enjoyed the real-world-Matrix promised by the book's basic narrative conflict. It ends on a not particularly satisfying cliffhanger, but it's obvious that there's another book to follow up on the story and the whole thing was written well enough that I could go for some more.

In summary, the premise is interesting and the technical realism of the book is incredibly admirable. The story is a good yarn as it grows from a tight local scope to a rabid world-is-at-stake technoepic. The characters are not particularly nuanced and you can expect a book focused on the sausage party of epic hacker culture to espouse some of those sausage party views as far as characters and narrative tropes go.

Really looking forward to the second book. It's good to read a book that feels as much science fact as it is science fiction, especially in the relatively new-to-fiction world of software development. show less

A reclusive (and deceased) software Gates/Woz/Jobs founder has left behind a fantastically engineered expert system, stuffed with decision trees to manipulate (and empower) humans to change the structure of our world. Playing society like a chess master, this system serves as the interaction nexus for an ever-growing movement to change business, government, and even daily citizen life. It sounds terribly implausible, but while you're reading it just seems absolutely believable. That's the fun of this book (and the sequel Freedom(TM), which is really just part 2 of a single work).