Daemon by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
TLDR – Daemon starts off as a promising techno-thriller with a somewhat plausible premise but ends up being a run of the mill action roller coaster with killer robots. It’s a fun, if unsatisfying genre piece.
Daniel Suarez knows his domain – contemporary / near future technology and it’s implications. What I am also quite sure about that he has a rather pessimistic view of where things are going. Daemon starts as a crime procedural with a small town cop trying to solve two seemingly unconnected deaths that appear accidental. We quickly find out that there is a rather sinister force behind these deaths. We encounter disenchanted, anarchist-libertarian hackers, mysterious computer programmers who are not quite who they seem, and lots of sinister government types who simply know whats best for everyone.
The key character is the eponymous Daemon – a networked, non sentient computer system that is a dead computer genius’s gift to humanity. The Daemon has very specific plans (though they are never revealed – we will have to wait for the sequel) for humanity and it goes about recruiting brilliant, motivated followers through a variety of somewhat plausible means. We have entertaining descriptions of computer games and call centre software amongst other things. I really enjoyed this, the first half of the book. A particular standout was the police / FBI raid on the dead computer genius’s computerised mansion which I found most satisfyingly and gratuitously violent and explosively entertaining.
The book jumps forward a few months around the half way mark. This is where things get problematic. There are large passages that involve discussions between nameless “important” people in the FBI, CIA, NSA and other alphabet agencies as they wring their hands and try and figure out just exactly what is going on. Yes, we know government bureaucrats are clueless, thank you. The episodic, multi-character structure of the book also becomes a problem here. There are a number of characters who fade in and out. There is a particular character, a FBI special operations type fellow, who must be based on someone the author dislikes. He appears in two long passages, and appears to take a huge amount of punishment: being blown up, burnt, shot at, attacked by killer robots, being thrown off a car, etc. But it is difficult to really care too much because we don’t know anything at all about this particular, long suffering sap. The book builds up to an explosive climax involving a long car chase and,yes, more killer robots.
I enjoyed reading Daemon – just like I enjoy big budget sci-fi / action movies or playing first person shooters. There are some neat touches, cool technology, lots of explosions, and killer robots. But, in keeping with genre tropes, we also get gratuitous violence, paper thin characters, and an inconsistent plot. A strong recommendation for those who like computer games and are anarcho-techno-libertarians. An entertaining and somewhat lightweight read for the rest of us.