Daemon

Daniel Suarez, Quercus

ISBN 10: 1847249442 / ISBN 13: 9781847249449

Published by Quercus Publishing Plc, 2009

About this Item

Matthew Sobol, programming genius, founder of CyberStorm Entertainment, one of the richest and most powerful of Silicon Valley's elite, is dead, but his final creation lives on to execute his last will and testament. At the moment of Sobol's death, computer programs around the world burst into life, creating an entity known as the Daemon.The Daemon infiltrates our hyper-connected society, gathering secrets, stealing identities. Soon it has the power to change lives as well as the power to take them: those who serve the Daemon are rewarded; those who defy it are eliminated. Recruiting acolytes from the dispossessed and disaffected, the Daemon secures a growing stranglehold on the world's most precious commodity: information. And once you control information itself, how easy would it be to remake the world? It is up to an unlikely alliance - a computer illiterate detective and a white-hat hacker with secrets of his own - to challenge the monster that Sobol unleashed from beyond the grave. But before they can confront the Daemon they must discover what it wants.; Paperback 2009 met fris en schoon binnenwerk. Licht scheef gelezen exemplaar met dunnen leeslijntjes in de rug, hoekjes ezelsoren.

Seller Inventory # 947918

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Daemon
• Publisher: Quercus Publishing Plc
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847249442
• ISBN 13: 9781847249449
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Fair
• Seller catalogs:
  • Thrillers

About this title

Synopsis

When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet's interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It's up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is to destroy civilization...

Review

Robin Cook on Daemon
Doctor and author Robin Cook is widely credited with introducing the word "medical" to the thriller genre. Thirty-one years after the publication of his breakthrough novel, Coma, he continues to dominate the category he created, including his most recent bestseller, Foreign Body, which explores a growing trend of medical tourism--first-world citizens traveling to third-world countries for 21st-century surgery.

Daemon is an ambitious novel, which sets out not only to entertain, which it surely does, but also to challenge the reader to consider social issues as broad as the implications of living in a technologically advanced world and whether democracy can survive in such a world.

The storyline portrays one possible world consequent to the development of the technological innovations that we currently live with and the reality that the author, Suarez, imagines will evolve, and it is chilling and tense (on www.thedaemon.com the reader can find evidence that the seemingly incredible advances Suarez proposes could in fact become real). Daemon is filled with multiple scenes involving power displays by the Daemon's allies resulting in complete loss of control by its enemies, violence with new and innovative weaponry, explosions, car crashes, blood, guts, and limbs-cut-off galore.

As far as computer complexity, Daemon will satisfy any computer geek's thirst. I was thankful for Pete Sebeck, the detective in the book whose average-person understanding of computers necessitates an occasional explanation about what is going on. I came away from the novel with a new understanding, respect, and fear of computer capability.

In the end, Suarez invites the reader to enter the "second age of reason," to think about where recent and imminent advances in computer technology are taking us and whether we want to go there. For me, it is this "thinking" aspect of the novel which makes it a particularly fun, satisfying, and significant read.