Daemon, the novel

I enjoyed Daniel Suarez’s new book Daemon, a novel, though I’m glad I checked it out of the library rather than buying it. It’s a trifle far-fetched, this takeover of the corporate world by distributed computing via the Internet, facilitated by automated automobiles and online gamers with a hunger to pull real triggers for a change. It seems to have become something of a cult book with techies, and, indeed, I first heard about it from a programmer friend.

Still… It ends, after a wild series of car chases, with the bad guys winning and the promise in the back pages of a sequel out next year. There’s already a Web site. Something tells me it will become a movie/television series. It has plenty of tough talk, kinky sex and gory violence, layered around the techy chatter, some of which goes on for page after page. Most of the tech is admirably explained, but doesn’t seem quite real. The government’s usual ineptness isn’t surprising, but the corporate greed is overdone. Only the little guys seem to have any principles, but, naturally, they’re on the run.