Book Review–Daemon

I’ve got out the blogging habit! Not an intentional thing but something that annoys me when it does.

I finished reading a book this week and enjoyed it so much I thought I’d give it a mention.

I actually picked the book up in March. I was in a book shop and the cover and title grabbed my attention (Look at it! It’s screaming “buy me you geek!”)

I got it home, read a couple of chapters and didn’t go back to it until the weekend just passed.

I wish I hadn’t left it so long! It really drew me in. I was reading it in bed earlier in the week and totally lost track of time and before I knew it I’d been reading for four hours! It did mean I got through most of it though

I’ve mentioned on the blog a couple of times in the past that I’ve got a very specific taste in fiction which makes it really hard to find anything as there isn’t really a genre that fits it. “Techno-Thriller” is what they seem to get labelled under but they rarely have their own section in book stores. Amazon had this one down as “Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Thrillers” and “Fiction > Adventure Stories & Action”

So the plot,

Here is the description from the back of the book

Matthew Sobel is dead, but his final creation survives.
A man is found brutally murdered – and the only possible perpetrator happens to be dead. As more killings follow, it becomes clear that mass carnage is being planned and organised from beyond the grave.
The Daemon is seemingly unstoppable, and murder is the least of its capabilities.
A lethal program designed by a twisted genius, the Daemon inhabits the systems on which an increasingly interconnected society depends. In a world where everyone and everything is online, nothing is out of its reach.
Just don’t turn on that computer…

Without giving away too many spoilers, imagine if a program (or series of programs) were created with criminal intent to make use of the Internet to fulfil it’s goal? This could mean anything from making use of government databases such as automatic number plate recognition services and social security details to simply the ability to scare someone by controlling light switches!

Or to put it another way, if you’ve played any modern computer game you’ve seen how clever and involved the virtual worlds they create are. What if the game engine ran on the Internet and the game world it controlled was actually the physical world?

What is really frightening about the book is that most of the concepts aren’t entirely based in fiction. While some of the technology is what you’d call “bleeding edge” it all feels entirely plausible.

This is in part down to the author “Daniel Suarez” who when not writing books is actually systems consultant so knows his tech!

Another interesting thing about the book is where it came from. Having written the book Daniel struggled to get a publisher to entertain it (as I imagine happens hundreds of times a week across the world!).

Convinced he had a product people would buy he got it in front of bloggers who write about topics that are in the book who wrote posts about the book. He created his own publishing company and used a print-on-demand service to create the books!(full details in an article on Wired)

As I said above it really drew me and the only disappointing thing was when it finished!

This is mainly because the book is a two-parter so the story didn’t get wrapped up (the second book is called Freedom tm). The bonus is I’ll have a whole other book to read

Neither books are particularly expensive so I recommend any self respecting geek has a look!

The book also has a supporting website (TheDaemon.com) which also has links to more reviews as well as some information about the technology behind the book (Hypersonic Sound Systems look very cool, especially with how they are used in the book) and a couple of sample chapters from both books.