Daemon

I picked this up last week looking for some light entertainment out of my normal genre of fantasy and was very surprised by just how much I liked it. The book is entertaining, fast paced; believable enough to where it almost makes me unplug my Internet connection. This book is an excellent start to a writing career that I look forward to following. I will be marking the sequel down as a must have. This is a techno thriller portraying a type of Internet doomsday. Although there are a lot of hi-tech things portrayed within the book it does not require you to be an IT expert to understand. The author has done a great job and this book should appeal to the technology expert and us everyday readers as well.

If you know even just a little about AI, encryption, computer networks, gaming and internet technology you're going to LOVE this book. This is one of those books that's a wild ride right from the beginning, a page turner that you can't put down even late into the night when you really should be sleeping. This WILL keep you awake. Every time you start to put it down, the next 'big thing' occurs and you just have to find out the outcome. It starts out with an obituary on Matthew Sobol, a top computer game designer who's designed a half dozen games and he leaves behind kind of a super game in the form of a daemon that scans internet obituaries and news articles for keywords that trigger a world changing sequence of events. A detective, Peter Sebeck, who is investigating a pair of Internet-related homicides and Jon Ross, who is trying to help his company battle a virus become involved in trying to stop this destructive force from causing irreparable damage to the world. Anyone involved or interested in online gaming and virtual environments should find the technology aspect of this book especially intriguing. The plot revolves around an online game where it becomes a fine line between a virtual world and the material one. I understand that this is the first book by Daniel Suarez and that he published it under another name, Leinad Zeraus, a little over a year ago. He's an amazing writer and has another book in the works for next year. This one reads like you're watching a movie. You know how you can see the characters interacting and watch the action unfolding as you read some books? This is like that. It reminded me of a high tech Michael Crichton novel. It's based on real technology, some that you probably know about or have heard of, and some that will have you Googling to figure out what he's talking about. It's high action, suspenseful, and just a thrilling ride from beginning to end and will leave you asking yourself, "Could something like this really happen?" I wish I could give this book 6 stars. It's really THAT good!

Buy it. Read it. Give it to a friend. I actually slapped myself on the forehead twice reading this thing.

Based on the back-cover blurb, I expected Daemon would be an interesting `high concept' techno-thriller, but this book floored me. Zeraus seems to have thoroughly researched the technology presented and combines it in ways that are exciting and terrifying. This book pulls you in and doesn't let go. You might think you know where the story is going, but believe me: you don't. This book will surprise you countless times, and it will stay with you long after you finish it.

This book is a jarring wakeup call in the form of a story engaging enough to keep me up through the night. If you're like me and tended to dismiss gamers, hackers, and other subcultures as probably passing fads or otherwise below the noise, you won't after reading this. This book may not herald *the* future that is coming, but it certainly gives blinding insight into a kind of future that is likely... and may unexpectedly be the *best* kind of future we can hope for, given the alternatives our current trends could lead us to. Don't get me wrong, this book is not a cleverly-packaged lecture; it is a clean, tight, first-class story with very human (and unhuman) characters that raced, twisting, to a conclusion that left me dying to read Mr. Zeraus's next offering. This book will change the way you look at our society, and may lead you to rethink your positioning as it evolves.