Daniel Suarez: Daemon

[sparkchaser]

A friend of mine gave me a copy of Daniel Suarez's Daemon as a gift a few months back and it gets the honor of being the first book I read in 2011.

Online gaming empire owner Matthew Sobol's obituary in an online news feed triggers the actions of a daemon (a computer program that runs in the background instead the direct control of a user) which causes the death of an executive from Sobol's company. The news of this executive's death triggers more daemons which run their own sets of commands programmed by Sobol (and others) to begin an all out cyberwar with the status quo to bring about a new age of humanity. The pacing was good and the plausibility a little too real for comfort until the last third which seemed to stretch things a bit, but hey it's SciFi.

I give it and I will definitely be picking up the sequel to see how things turn out.

 

[Tai_Mai_Shu]

3 stars huh? I have this on my lists but will not be on my priority list.

 

[sparkchaser]

3-1/2 is more honest I think. I liked it but it wasn't stellar.

 

[direstraits]

It was not bad, but it got really out of hand plot-wise pretty quickly. Out of hand as in pretty out of this world. I liked the concept and there were several ideas that were quite interesting (API for the daemon had me grinning).

But if Sobol acted alone, there's no way in hell he could have covered all the possibilities in his programming. That's like billions of programming man-hours!

Ok, maybe I got too caught up with the logistics there.

 

[sparkchaser]

Ah, but Sobol didn't act alone!

Spoiler

Remember the first two people to die? They were intimately involved in laying out the groundwork.

I actually got into this exact same discussion with the friend that gave me the book and he told me that Suarez said that a lot of these decisions and such were made by people recruited by the Daemon, and later defining more of the plan on its behalf.

 

[direstraits]

Ok, this post will look strange.

Spoiler

Yeah, true, but I cannot imagine how they would not know they will be killed if they know even a sliver of what Sobol planned. There didn't seem to be anybody else recruited to create new actions for the Daemon after the initial trigger.

Just look at the way the 2 were killed. Even coding something like that to cater for every eventuality for the murders to occur would have taken him a very long time, and that's excluding all the *other* parts of daemon programming (i.e. the defense of the house, the recruiting, and assembling that gun - wow!)

I'm analyzing this too much, I know, but this was at the back of my head the whole time I was reading it.

 

[sparkchaser]

I agree but

Spoiler

the first murder seems very possible for anyone with even minimal coding experience to do

. I'll read the next one in the series eventually.

 

[direstraits]

Let me know how that goes, sparky. I'll wait till it's like 5 bucks or something before I plonk down the cash for it, or until you return and tell me to get it immediately.

 

[sparkchaser]

Roger that.