Daemon

Just a little over a year ago I was in the Las Vegas Airport looking for something to read on my flight back to New York.  But the shelves of the McCarran airport book nook stores were plastered with churned out books on politics, the end of the world, or both--topics I have more than enough opinion on myself.  There were a few promising titles amid the smarmy mug of Joel Osteen and Nicholas Sparks novels, but most were ones I had already read or didn't want to risk not finishing because they were started as a throw-away airplane read.  I was walking around with a copy of What Would Google Do? (which I would later read and enjoy) when I came across the last copy of Daniel Suarez's Daemon.  Assuming the nature of the book from it's title, the back cover revealed only that it was a work of fiction and that Craig Newmark, creator of Craigslist, had given a quote in support of the book.  That was enough for me and I tossed WWGD aside and bought Daemon.

By the time my flight pushed back from the gate it would have taken a severe and sudden loss of altitude to pry that book from my hands. When the plane landed I had read roughly 300 pages and the book was finished before I slept that night.  It hooked me, to put it mildly.  What I was hooked on was a story that I had never read before.  Unique in so many respects, Daemon held a genuinely original plot based on science fiction that was more science than fiction.  The story moved at a rapid pace, carefully weaving a nearly overwhelming amount of real world technology into a fantastic narrative which left me with that sublime realization, "This could happen!  No.  This is happening."

Daemon presents a world in which a distributed artificial intelligence, a piece of intelligence that is not sentient but instead is more akin to the world's most complex Choose Your Own Adventure book, begins to slowly change the world we live in through the power it can wield via the internet and our networked systems--whether we like it or not.  It manipulates our infrastructure as well as society with the calm logic that only a computer program can muster.  The classics like Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey suggest that the real threat is artificial intelligence.  Daemon suggests that instead the threat comes from a "smart" infrastructure in the hands of human intelligence with a powerful will to manipulate it.

A few weeks ago Suarez's much anticipated sequel, Freedom™ arrived and I immediately purchased it as an audiobook and began listening.  Freedom™ picks up exactly where Daemon left off, but the whole of the reader's perspective on the events in Daemon and the characters embroiled in the conflict is turned on its head.  Suarez makes it increasingly difficult to determine right from wrong and the good from the bad in this future where the real civilizations of the world meet the contrived civilizations of World of Warcraft or Everquest.  In fact, it is hard to tell where the fall of one society ends and the rise of another begins--and even if you could spot that line, Suarez makes it difficult to rest a moral judgement upon it.  

The two books together form an engrossing example of a future.  A future in which our technology coexists with us in a symbiotic relationship.  As an unabashed futurist I find the ideas in these books fascinating and even compelling.  Others may find it horrifying.  In either case, it is a future worth reading about, if only because it is a future not very far off at all.