"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."
To be honest, I almost gave up on Daniel Suarez debut novel Daemon
after about 40 pages, when the character of Gragg goes to a rave. There he
separates a young women from her friends, drug her, then is able to get her to
undress and give blowjobs to him and about forty other men all lined up behind
him. Oh, and while this is going on, he’s streams it. While the purpose of this
was to establish Gragg as scumbag, which I guess is the point, but this could’ve
been done in a less sleazy and offensive way.
I do think the book does have some potentially interesting ideas, however Suarez
squanders it multiple times (it sometimes comes off as an updated version of The Lawnmower Man). While the book is entirely plot driven, he does introduces a huge cast of mostly bad guys (and
not some sort of modern anti-hero, let’s be honest here) who appear to be based
on late 1980s action thriller villains in films made by Golan-Globus company
The Cannon Group. These guys are all just stock
characters, baddies of little imagination and no particular interest. What good guys that do
appear, seem completely idiotic and are killed off in rather gruesome sorts of
ways. But you end up not caring in the end, as they’re all paper thin creations, and ultimately boring.
And when Suarez tries to impress the
readers with his tech-savvy knowledge, it comes off more pretentious than
intriguing and he just assumes everyone will understand what he's writing. The book seems destined for people who are gamers and fans
of MMORPG. He really explains nothing, which also can make a
non-gamer fan feel really stupid. And even though he’s trying to keep the novel
grounded in reality –less he gets stuck in the sci-fi genre that is more cult-ish than
broad based audience he wants- the book becomes less and less a speculative futuristic novel, and more a
tale that seems cobbled together by writers of 1970’s Doctor Who who think this is what "kids want" in their entertainment.
In the end, narrative runs wildly
out of control and it never recovers any sense of logic or reason. It ends on a cliffhanger, which leads
into 2010's Freedom™. But for me, Daemon is such an awful
book, and despite having the second book here, I really don’t think I’ll be
reading it anytime soon.
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