As a part-time tech-head who has been working and playing with computers since the early 80s, I was intrigued by the book and genuinely fascinated here and there. As a one-time English major who has been reading serious fiction for a good deal longer, I was pretty nonplussed. I'm a little reluctant to take a superior attitude, but I might as well be honest (while trying not to be harsh): this is science fiction that's strong on the former and weak on the latter.

Daniel Suarez (see my side note below) has a good grasp of MMORPGs, WiFi hacking, botnets, acoustic weapons, HUD goggles, and other aspects of gadgetology, and a much poorer grasp of the elements of fiction, which means, among other things, that there's hardly a developed human character in the book. That's not to say that he hasn't written a decent techno-thriller; insofar as keeping you turning the pages counts, he does that, and a fair amount more than that. He's got a pretty ingenious idea, and since realizing what it is is part of the fun of the book, I won't say more. But even within the limits of the techno-thriller, Suarez made some misjudgments, and I ceased to believe in it before the end. Nor is the end really a conclusion; if you stick it out as I did hoping for a resolution, you'll instead find yourself invited to stick around for a presumed sequel. Which I doubt I'll read, unless that book generates some blurbs that plausibly invoke, say, William Gibson, instead of Bruce Sterling, Tom Clancy, and Michael Crichton. Technical satisfactions you'll find here (as you will in Sterling, Clancy, and Crichton); aesthetic pleasure such as Gibson can provide is far from likely.

Side note: Apparently this book was originally self-published, with the author writing under the pseudonym Leinad Zeraus. It was bought (in the U.S. at least) by the Dutton imprint of Penguin Group and was published in January 2009 under the author's real name, Daniel Suarez. What I read in late 2008 was an advance, uncopyedited manuscript of the Dutton edition.