Daniel Suarez and His Evil God: Daemon
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Author: Daniel Suarez
Title: Daemon Genre: Science Fiction Matthew Sobol is dead. The wunderkind developer of the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, "Over the Rhine," and founder and CEO of Cyberstorm Entertainment; Sobol succumbed to brain cancer at the tender age of thirty-four. His memory lives on... and on... and on... Upon his death, a renegade process infiltrates the internet and initiates an attack against humankind the likes of which as never been seen before. Sobol's corporeal entity may be returning to dust, but his mind lives on in the Daemon, a background process that bides its time until something triggers it. The first stirrings of the Daemon¹ are murders; a remote-control Hummer with a thirst for blood; a sumptuous mansion exploding in a huge fireball. Nothing is beyond the reach of the Daemon. If a computer is involved, the daemon can corrupt at will: frame an uncooperative victim with backdated deposits in an offshore account, create a protection racket that skims ten per cent off the top of the Mafiyah's on-line porn and gambling profits, blackmail any business in the world to do its bidding. The Daemon is omniscient. The Daemon is omnipresent. The Daemon is omnipotent. The Daemon is... well, the Daemon is pretty much a god. It's a god that needs feet on the street, and so the Daemon recruits its troops from the cream of OTR's players; from the disaffected; from the prisons - they're computerized, too, so the Daemon can commute any sentence it desires or shift an unwilling inmate from minimum security to death row. The "establishment" has computers, too - and so the Daemon's troops can stay a step or six ahead of any government, any police force, any potential enemy. Only a few hackers and the genius heading up the NSA cyberterrorism task force have any hope of making headway against the Daemon. And they don't have much... Mankind's fear that his creations will turn on him predates written language (prehistoric Og may well have turned to Ug and said, "Me afraid fire!"), so Daemon author Daniel Suarez simply translates Golem and Rampaging Robot from manufactured artifact into a few bazillion lines of code set loose on a distributed network. His mad genius, Matthew Sobol, claims to serve as midwife for the birth of a new civilization; not unlike other madmen who thought that they knew what was best for the world. Suarez comes to the writing desk with a wealth of knowledge about his subject. A dedicated gamer and a longtime freelance computer security expert who's consulted to several Fortune 500 companies, Suarez clearly knows his subject, and he is quite adept at explaining that technology to the less technologically gifted among us. Explanations and definitions are (usually) clear and concise, and his plot has sufficient plausibility to give even the least paranoid among us pause. Lots of pause... the mere concept that nation states are essentially helpless against a construct such as the Daemon is enough to get some of us thinking about life without computers again. Where Suarez's decidedly ambitious opus falls down is in the nuts and bolts of writing. He may be good at explaining technical details, but he's not so good at creating characters. Their dialog is stilted and flat, their personalities are thin and ill-defined. Suarez tosses out a nicely-turned phrase or other bon mot every few pages, but the spaces in between are clogged and stodgy. The overall plot suffers mostly from a lack of a hero - unless, that is, you're rooting for Matthew Sobol's Daemon. Suarez and his publisher (Dutton) also push one of my personal buttons: the book ends in the middle of the story arc, followed by the announcement of a sequel (Freedom) to be published in 2010. Had he been more parsimonious with his prose, Suarez might have finished in one - and had Dutton printed on the cover that this is "Book 1 of the..." I would've left it on the shelf. Overall, a fascinating concept turned into a moderately interesting plot that's ill-supported by mediocre writing. Two stars: that's my story, and I'm sticking to it (and if the Daemon is really omnipotent, it can easily turn two to five...) ¹ for the non-technical (and some of the techies, too), the word "daemon" is not pronounced "Damon," but - you guessed it - "demon." How fitting... copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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