Daemon (Daemon, #1) in What's the Name of That Book???

Nov 16, 2021 thefourthvine rated it did not like it

Shelves: sff, ai, thriller

Me, several months ago, to various websites: What science fiction mysteries are good? I have a hankering.

All of those websites: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez! You will love it! It is the BEST and SHINIEST.

Those websites were wrong in every particular. This is not a mystery; it's a thriller. (You know who committed the crimes by 10%, but also you know if you read the summary.) I did not love it. And it is not good, never mind best.

I will say, though, that it is in some ways clever. It was written a Me, several months ago, to various websites: What science fiction mysteries are good? I have a hankering.

All of those websites: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez! You will love it! It is the BEST and SHINIEST.

Those websites were wrong in every particular. This is not a mystery; it's a thriller. (You know who committed the crimes by 10%, but also you know if you read the summary.) I did not love it. And it is not good, never mind best.

I will say, though, that it is in some ways clever. It was written a decade and a half ago and doesn't feel hugely dated yet, which is an impressive feat, given that it is about computer technology and set in its own present. And it is absolutely paced correctly; Suarez definitely does know how to write at the thriller pace, and he knows how to recount a plot.

Unfortunately, that is absolutely all he's doing here; he's reporting on a plot he thought up. The characters in this cast of thousands are almost all interchangeable, the interactions between them are either nonexistent or shallow, and almost every single character is an asshole (and the rest are mostly psychopaths). That last part isn't all bad, though; most of the characters die, and even though those deaths are generally very graphically described (this is THE book to read if you want lots of details of blood spatter), I never once felt sad or even mildly distressed about it. I was too busy trying to remember which Stoic Man this was, or which Miscellaneous Tech Bro I could mentally knock off the character list. (This is what happens when you have many, many characters, most of whom have no personalities; no one gives a shit about them.) I was, however, a little bit sad when one of the characters turned out not to be dead; I had been glad to see him go, and then he came BACK, which I guess I should have expected. The villains never die the first time, and virtually every character in this on both sides is a villain.

But, hey, better to be a Dead Miscellaneous Tech Bro Villain in this book than any woman at all. There's a scene of graphically, happily described gang rape of a woman who gets no name beyond "Jennifer," apparently included just for funsies. There's the public humiliation of one of the two actual female characters (this one's stereotype is Spoiled Bitch, but I'm not complaining about the one-note stereotype characterization, since most of the characters don't have anything else). And there's the blinding of the other female character. Suarez doesn't really give speaking parts to the rest of the countable-on-the-fingers-of-one-hand women in this cast of thousands, but he does make sure we know they're all super hot! Like. Every woman is just SUPER hot. Which makes sense, because they're largely there as objects of male desire, so if they weren't super hot, what would be the point of even having them be women? (No, no assessment is made about hotness of the men, but then, they have actual plot functions, and literally no human is ever attracted to a man anyway, right?)

I realize I'm making this sound gross, but it's actually much grosser when you read it.

I also wonder if any of this book makes sense, because when it hit up against something I knew, I was like, uh, that is actually incorrect? That is not how that works at all? And I guess I just lost a lot of faith in Suarez's realism (and his factcheckers, if any) when he had a dude hooked up to an IV and bound to a bed for 46 hours *without a catheter* and it was not a problem in any way.

Fun additional bonus: if you do read this book, enjoy the not-ending! Because it literally doesn't have one. It resolves exactly zero of its plot threads and leaves most of them in Big Action Moments. Suarez wrote THE END at the end because he knew otherwise all of his readers would call the publisher to complain that they got shorted some chapters in their copy.

Ugh. I love science fiction mysteries. But they have to be BETTER THAN THIS SHIT. ...more

22 likes · Like · see review

Feb 06, 2009 Otis Chandler rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller, geek, ai

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

5 likes · Like · see review

May 06, 2011 Punk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, thriller

Techno Thriller. Matthew Sobol might be dead, but he lives on in the MMORPGs he designed, and now he's recruiting members for a deadly new game that's being played out in the real world. Or, you know, the old homicidal ghost in the machine story.

This is one of those thrillers that starts out by introducing twenty unconnected characters and then slowly brings them together over the course of the novel. Be sure not to get attached to any of them. This book has a high body count, mostly machine-on- ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 02, 2009 Matthias Ferber rated it liked it · review of another edition

A goofy, gripping thriller with a simple but perfect premise: dying software genius leaves behind a sophisticated automated software agent -- a daemon in computing terms -- to scan news feeds for word of his death and to carry out his deadly will From Beyond The Grave. Despite its crappy Thriller Writing 101 prose style (you know, "'Stay back!' barked Police Sergeant Pete Drummold, a well-muscled fourteen-year veteran of the Generic Township police force and a champion Go player", that sort of t ...more

Like · see review

Mar 19, 2010 Jennie rated it liked it

Shelves: thriller

My biggest problem with this book was the gratuitous, wholly unnecessary rave scene early in the book. Suarez used other methods later to show how bad that particular character was, and those scenes were actually relevant to the story. Gang rape (or any other kind), especially for the purposes of a throw-away establishing shot, is not entertainment.

Like · see review