Daemon

Daemon by Daniel Suarez is not a book I would normally read.  It's an action packed, high tech thriller with a bit too much violence for my taste.  I read it, however, because it is the set up to Suarez's sequel, Freedom, a book that deals with corporate globalization.  Freedom was recommended to me by Paul Hirsche, and José Cordero is reading it right now.  Both say it is worth the read.

A daemon is a software program that runs continuously in the background of a computer system.  It's invisible to users until an "event" happens that triggers the program.  In this case, the "event" is Matthew Sobol, a legendary computer game designer's death.  Sobel is the architect of a program that once activated, takes on a life of its own.  Essentially, Suarez's daemon is on the way to systematically taking over the world.  It runs, of course, on logic, and the author does a good job of making the story plausible.   Since virtually all of our institutions dependent on computers, it's not difficult to feel vulnerable to this sort of attack. Plus, certain aspects of this dystopia are similar to the world we live in already.  We don't have to imagine the presence of nefarious minds tampering with our data.  We read about technology spies and hackers in the news.

This book is by no means great literature, but an interesting commentary on today's political, technological and economic climate.  I want to follow up with Freedom before the summer is over, but I'm in no rush.  According to my sources, Sobol's motives for creating the daemon are revealed in Freedom, and they are not what you think they might be.