Daemon

Daemon (Daemon #1)

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4.2 of 5 stars 4.20  ·  rating details  ·  9,907 ratings  ·  1,380 reviews
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, transferr...more
Audiobook, 1 page
Published January 8th 2009 by Penguin Audiobooks (first published August 1st 2006)
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Kemper
If you were someone with more computer knowledge and money than Bill Gates, and you found out you were dying, would you:

A) Give all your money to charity just in case you can buy your way into heaven.
B) Indulge in an around the world drinking, drug and sex spree until going out in a blaze of glory by crashing your private jet into an erupting volcano live on CNN.
C) Pour all your money into a cryogenics program and freeze yourself like Walt Disney in the hope that they’ll finally figure out a way...more
Michael
Billionaire computer software mogul Matthew Sobol has died and he wants to make sure he leaves behind a legacy. That legacy comes in the form of a daemon, or a computer programing running in the background of every system that has installed his massively popular on-line, multi-player video game. When news of Sobol's death hits the Internet, the daemon becomes active, creating havoc across the world as it exploits vulnerabilities in computer networks and uses them for its own purposes.

Daniel Suar...more
Mike
Mar 08, 2009 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: God--we used to fear You, now we fear another kind of programmer.
I learned that we used to fear supercomputers (cf. The Corbin Project) but now should fear superprogrammers and/or obsessive gamers. There's all kinds of pleasure one could take in chewing over the metaphorical fodder of this novel's central Threat: is it a gloss on the blurring of virtual and real worlds? A jeremiad about the dangers of our super-networked interglobalizachology? Or a veiled reminder of the way terrorist cells take down the body politic? Or...

Ah, fuck it. Big scary computer shit...more
Nathan
Awful. "Daemon" suffers from all the usual pitfalls of the first novel: unoriginal premise, wooden dialogue, melodramatic action, clumsy exposition, sloppy resolution, inconsequential subplotting. When the author tries to be witty, he comes off as conceited; when he tries to impress with his tech-savvy, he sounds as if he's quoting from "Popular Science" magazine. This was the worst book I've read in a while, and I'm not sure whether I want Daniel Suarez to stop writing altogether, or give him c...more
Chris
Well written, and successfully both gripping and credibly accurate, as one would expect of a book reviewed on Slashdot. Unfortunately, the beginning has several problems, all of which may be Suarez attempting to ensure he is taken seriously:

* The painstakingly correct detail distracts from the story a bit.
* The concept of the world being decided by a battle between carders feels silly.
* Suarez makes it a point to demonstrate just how evil some of the characters are. This squicked me out slightly...more
Nicolai
"The DaVinci Code" for Wired readers. Some mindless fun for when the mood strikes.

Read it soon though, since the "modern high tech" or 2006 has already started to expire.
Keri
Into the third chapter of this book I had to close it for good. I was very disappointed given its good reviews. There were a few swear words but as the F-bombs started to land, the Rave parties began, drug dealers started trash talking, prostitutes hit the scene and a date rape began I had to quit, all before chapter 4. This was such a departure from the "computer program gone awry, murder mystery" premise I was totally taken off guard. I wish there was a content rating for books like there are...more
Weavre
Oct 03, 2011 Weavre rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Weavre by: Was this from Samantha's list? I think so.
In the Eighties, I read and loved the genre called "cyberpunk," and was disappointed to see it vanish as the fantasy Net was replaced with the very real Web, imagined microcommunicators were replaced with Bluetooth headsets, and anyone anywhere with a bit of knowledge and equipment became able--for real--to dive into government databases, corporate financial records, and anything else on the web. Cyberpunk-era virtual reality bore a strong resemblance to Second Life, but as the reality became ma...more
Otis Chandler
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Ben Simpson
Someone should give this man a pat on the back. He got every tech detail accurate as far as I could discern, which is a welcome change to the current Hollywoodification of tech thrillers (Skyfall anyone? - yuck)

I flew through this book and loved every minute of it. I could have done without the brutal mistreatment of a woman at the beginning of the the book, but it did server to vilify one of the main antagonists. After this opening scene, you are thrown into a world of action, and mystery. I lo...more
Samantha
Jan 08, 2009 Samantha rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Samantha by: Vine Book
This is definitely one of the best books I've read in a year. The premise was fascinating. It's a great thrill ride. Can someone program computers with backdoor programs to read the newswires and make other things happen? Can a computer drive a car and kill people? Are there people so involved in the gaming world that they would do things in the real world just because a game told them to or just to earn more points in their gaming world? This book is extremely fast paced and never boring. Don't...more
Bobbie
Jul 15, 2008 Bobbie rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone who likes Heinlein or Sci Fi
Recommended to Bobbie by: Alison
I didn't know what to expect from this book and I fully admit to having got through 5/6 of it before I realized what the main (spectral) character was up to. It was violent but well written, and while I question the efficacy of any one persons ability to be able to code such a Daemon (perhaps a Stephen Hawking sort could) it did give me some gratification at one point (Death to All Spammers) and some food for thought. For example, two characters are offered "whatever they want" (turns out that b...more
Alper Çugun
This came highly recommended from some friends which makes it all the more unfortunate that it didn't live up to expectations.

Daemon's merit is that the ideas in it serve a plot from the realm of sci-fi but one whose execution is feasible and even thinkable with our current state of technology and society.

The philosophy and story it tells is a bit of a mashup between Snow Crash, the Matrix and most pop-sci books from the past ten years. Unfortunately the story crashes under the weight of its own

...more
Samantha
A solid debut novel from Mr. Suarez. This highly suspenseful techno-thriller/dystopian sci fi tale is centered around a genius computer game designer, Matthew Sokol who has passed away. But his legacy is sinister indeed - a computer program, aka a "daemon," so complex it sets up a series of fatal events and ensnares various people in its plans, stating with the dispassion of the program that it is that they will die if they don't cooperate. More than mere terrorism, Sokol's program has designs f...more
John
Cybernetic thrillers about the end of life as we know it aren’t a usual stop for me, and when I started this tale about a twisted genius inventor of computer games who happens to be dead and the havoc he wreaks on the living, I really wasn’t expecting to get beyond the first chapter. But Daniel Suarez knows his stuff, explains it deftly so that mind-boggling concepts don’t interrupt the action, and keeps you turning those damned pages (except when you just have to put the book down to chew on so...more
Rena McGee
With first novels, there is often a feeling of awkwardness. The writer hasn’t quite found his or her voice yet, or hasn’t fully realized the world in which the novel is set. (“Incompletely realized world” would be true of a mainstream novel taking place in modern-day Los Angeles as it would be of a novel taking place on a not-quite-terraformed Mars. How I might perceive or write about Los Angeles if I were to visit would be completely different from the perception of someone who lived there, for...more
Amy
This book, in my opinion, had so much potential. I was attracted to it because of the "computer technology taking over and creating havoc" plot interested me. The book continued to interest me by showing the "daemon" in a highly interactive video game that changes every time you play it. This interested me because it was similar to a few games I've played and made the book more realistic.

However, there was far too much technical talk. I'm fairly adept at computers and gaming but there was so mu...more
Gwern
An unfriendly AI designed by a dead billionaire (who for some reason reminded me a little of an evil John Carmack) takes over the world. The overall combination is good but nothing to write home about. The frequent appearance of autonomous vehicles is a nice touch and one too often absent from SF, near or far. Most of the technical details were good (I was not surprised to read the short author bio and learn Suarez is a practicing programmer, since the Ross character felt like an author self-ins...more
Jim Crigler
Feb 21, 2013 Jim Crigler rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Slashdotters and anarchists
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Ricky Penick
This is the first of a couple of first books by authors that write technology related fiction that I finally acquiesced to engage with after enduring relentless promotion within the technology community. Yes, I am deeply enmeshed, submerged or whatever, but no matter how deeply I dive into IT, I still have that BA in English. I am not so much a stickler that I can't abide some deviation from the rules of grammar. I am a techie, after all. But really, you should at least know the rules before you...more
Vegantrav
Awesome! Just awesome!

Consider the many massively multi-player online role-playing games (like World of Warcroft) to which so many are now addicted. These games have an artificial intelligence (AI) that helps structure play and serves as non-human controlled characters within the games.

Now, imagine creating such a game but using the real world as data inputs and having an AI to coordinate the real-world game so that it is no longer a game but is actually real life. Further imagine that this AI w...more
Roxanne Barbour
Blurb:Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer--the billionaire architect behind half a dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed millions of gamers around the world. 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 that may unravel the fabric of the hyperefficient, interconnected world Sobol left behind.
With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as n...more
Angela
I started the book expecting a mediocre, amateurish sci-fi thriller man-book with enough mindless page-turning action to provide some escape from a draining week, but the more I read, the more I was hooked. I could even forgive the gratuitous sex/violence and the evolutionary genetics missteps. First of all, Suarez knows his stuff. He isn't some hack writer who merely thinks he knows his science. He actually does as a former systems and software developer. At the same time that he manages to use...more
Terry
This was a fantastic fun read which explores the increasingly popular next-generation Internet/virtual world we are all going to be living in some way or another very soon. What Suarez does nicely, and this is a critical element for good books along these lines, is effectively take today's technology, tomorrow's technology and the day-after-that's technology and creates a very logical and believable descendant thereof. It works because it all makes perfect sense. We have what we have now and eve...more
Jake Taylor
Daniel Suarez's Daemon was a gripping read about an essential cyber apocalypse. The late computer genius Matthew Sobol created a globally distributed cyber daemon, a virus type program which infiltrated essentially the entire world wide web without anyone even knowing. Upon his death, Sobol's daemon was unleashed upon the world, with not only incredible cyber power and seemingly endless capital at its disposal, but an unemotional will to achieve its goal, a goal which to all except the daemon's...more
ConvincoDude
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Eric Thirolle
This is the first IT thriller that I have read that gets the details right. Suarez himself works in the IT field, and the authenticity of the details supports the overall believability of this story. The premise is that a computer genius, Matthew Sobol, designs a resilient "limited AI" that is released to the Internet and begins to take control of the world's largest corporations and to violently fight off any attempts to oppose it. To what end?: it is not clear yet...

This is pure thriller mater...more
ba
Jun 05, 2012 ba rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: geeks, spazzes, 20-somethings
Is 'Neal Stephenson' a genre? This book would probably fall into that classification, if so.

The death of a high-tech mogul puts into effect his plan to infect the world's networks with a distributed daemon in order to bring about a change to the social fabric. It's a very cool concept—sort of a cyberpunk take on Assimov's The Foundation Trilogy. that idea is backed up by a lot of cool thought exercises about the vulnerability of society, the relationship of parasite to host and how that applies...more
Stacey
Daemon—a computer program that runs in the background while you are doing other tasks.
Pete Sebeck is the first officer on the scene of a murder in an area where murder just doesn’t happen very often. But as the investigation continues, more strange deaths occur and seem to be related to Matthew Sobol, a multi-billionaire who was a computer genius and the creator of highly popular, massive multi-player online computer games. Unfortunately for the FBI, Mr. Sobol is dead. Complicating matters is t...more
Andre Farant
A computer game designer dies and, upon the online publication of his obituary, a daemon—a computer program running in the background, under no human control—is activated, setting off a chain reaction that will lead to numerous deaths and, quite possibly, a new world order.

Daemon is an inventive techno-thriller, blending Michael Crichton with Neil Stephenson. The science feels real, grounded in possibility if not probability, and, in the second half of the novel, as events accelerate and mass to...more
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Where they building the first Razorback? 3 55 Oct 12, 2012 06:39pm  
Modern SF: Daemon, Daniel Suarez (Group Read September 2012) 11 28 Sep 21, 2012 12:17am  
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New Online Community 1 41 Apr 09, 2010 06:21pm  
so far 2 30 Mar 02, 2009 02:52pm  
Daemon (Daemon, #1)
Daemon (Paperback)
Daemon (Paperback)
Daemon (Daemon, #1)
Daemon (Paperback)

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Daniel Suarez is an independent systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies. He has designed and developed enterprise software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries. An avid gamer and technologist, he lives in Los Angeles, California.

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