On Scott’s recommendation, I just read two books by Daniel Suarez: Daemon and Freedom™.

Daemon is the first in the set; it was originally self-published, and was then bought up and republished by Dutton, a branch of Penguin books. The sequel, Freedom™, was also put out by Dutton. And thank goodness these books got picked up by a big publisher, so they’re available to all of us. Because you guys, everyone should read these books.

They’re billed as “high-tech thrillers” and “technothrillers”, which is both accurate and not. The thing is, these books cover many different genres. Daemon starts out as a murder mystery and police procedural, but as the book moves on and the world of the book opens up, the scope of the novel grows. And Freedom™ grows even larger in scope, touching on diverse subjects from Chinese manufacturing to corn subsidies while still remaining tense and exciting.

At its most basic, Daemon is about the investigation around a pair of murders linked to a recently-deceased software developer, and the rogue computer program (daemon) triggered after his death. As the daemon grows and takes over systems, it also recruits humans to join its network and become operatives. The ensemble cast of characters is split between those working with the daemon and those set on destroying it. The book ends in a somewhat abrupt cliffhangery manner, with Freedom™ picking up immediately and increasing the scale and number of the groups working with and against the daemon.

I had issues with Daemon overexplaining things at the beginning; the first few chapters seem to all start with overly-detailed descriptions of characters, and a few technological things are described in too much detail as well. But after the first few chapters, the overexplaining is done, and the story gets cooking. And I suppose for people not as familiar with technology, some of the description is helpful. My library copy (a first-edition Dutton hardback) also had a number of glaring typos and punctuation errors, which have hopefully been corrected in later printings. Probably not a big issue for most people, but they popped me right out of the immersive reading experience. My other big issue with Daemon was a sudden romantic relationship out of nowhere. But those things aside, it was a fantastic book. Well-paced, exciting, with a great number of twists and turns.

I then dug straight into Freedom™ — the library had perfect timing, delivering it the same day I finished Daemon. No glaring errors like in the first book, hooray. And again: a swift pace, twists and turns galore, and at least one event that had Scott watching me as I read, so he could laugh at my shocked gasp (I didn’t disappoint). There was at least one character from the first book who wasn’t followed in the second, but the ensemble was a whole was great; as opposed to a lot of ensemble pieces, there wasn’t that one story that just wasn’t interesting (that is to say, there was no Nikki & Paulo story, or even a Michael & Walt).

I’ll be thinking about these books for a LONG time to come. And I’m glad that Scott has read them as well; we’re sure to have some great conversations about them. The movie rights for both books have been purchased, and sites like IMDB are showing a preliminary 2012 release for Daemon. Which is probably highly inaccurate, but it’s enough to wet my whistle. I agree with Scott’s casting choices for a couple of characters, and I’m sure we’ll do even more sky-pie casting in the future.

Daemon: 9 out of 10
Freedom™: 9 out of 10

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.