Daemon by Daniel Suarez: A Review
April 14, 2019
Intro
It’s been a while since i’ve had the chance to read a fiction book. I usually spend my free time involved with programming web applications or playing the guitar. Last week, I was traveling to England to see family and thought it would be a great time to find an enjoyable read for the long nine hour flight. As a kid, I used to love reading. I enjoyed all sorts of genres & read books voraciously. I do miss getting engrossed by them.
I was at my parents house the weekend before my flight to London and thought instead of buying a new book i’d just find something I haven’t read before in the house. In one of the drawers of our guest room there was a dusty old book that immediately caught my eye. Of all things, it was a software book not about programming concepts and theory but a fictional story about software and its implications on society. The book is DAEMON (Daemon Series). Dusting it off it was overall in good condition & so I decided to give it a try. Immediately I was hooked.
No spoilers of the book, no need to worry!
The story
As made evident by the title, the book is all about a daemon. This is a computer program that operates in the background without the control of a user. It is a condensed form of “Disk and Execution MONitor”.
In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. Wikipedia
The main protagonist Detective Peter Sebeck is tasked with finding and destroying a daemon that has been activated by a deceased software developer. The daemon wreaks havoc and is trying to manipulate and change society as people know it. For whether the daemon is actually good or evil is really left up to the reader to decide. But for one thing is certain, the daemon will stop at nothing to achieve its goal.
The writer does an incredible job at making the reader actually care about the characters in the story. You will be taken inside of games, interacting with advanced technology at the time, taken to different cities and places, even here in sunny old Florida. There is a lot of death and despair, and with many of the chapters it seems as if it’s impossible for the good side to win. The story really is a rollercoaster ride of emotions. For being a book about software it was just plain awesome.
Final Thoughts
For an older book written back in 2006, what would be the equivalent of a century by the way technology changes and moves. It has many concepts that are very much relevant today. The book had all the modern tech lingo of APIs, databases, networks, distributed systems, AI and terms that some people may not fully understand if they don’t know IT or software, but I think many individuals would enjoy reading Daemon. It drove home some very interesting points. Software and its effects on society as a whole. In our technology driven age we may very well see software taking care of a lot of things that used to be primarily human. There will most certainly be implications of this and although the book takes that point to a very extreme end of the spectrum, it is an interesting read nonetheless. Hopefully you may enjoy the story as much as I did. I’ve already gone ahead and purchased the second and final book in the series Freedom (TM) (Daemon Series).
After reading the book i’ve made a new goal for myself to read at least one fiction book a month (we’ll see how long that lasts :) ). Fiction really is an escape from reality and the picture of stories they paint in the mind tend to stick with me. I hope to read more often and to keep up with my goal. I will make a post on the book list that i’ve read at the end of the year.
Personal blog by Alex Virdee, 