Books by Suarez, Daniel
- Suarez, Daniel. Daemon. New York: Signet, 2009. ISBN 978-0-451-22873-4.
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Ever since “giant electronic brains” came into the public
consciousness in the 1940s and '50s, “the computers taking over”
has been a staple of science fiction, thrillers, and dystopian novels.
To anybody who knows anything about computers, most of these have fallen
in the spectrum from implausible to laughably bad, primarily because their
authors didn't understand computers, and attributed to them
anthropomorphic powers they don't possess, or assumed they had ways to
influence events in the real world which they don't.
Here we have a novel that gets it right, is not just a thoughtful
exploration of the interaction of computers, networks, and society, but a
rip-roaring thriller as well, and, remarkably, is a first novel.
In it, Matthew Sobol, a computer game designer who parleyed his genius
for crafting virtual worlds in which large numbers of individuals and
computer-generated characters interact
(massively
multiplayer online role-playing games) into a global enterprise,
CyberStorm Entertainment, and a personal fortune in the hundreds of
millions of dollars, tragically dies of brain cancer at the age of 34.
Shortly after Sobol's death, two CyberStorm employees die in bizarre
circumstances which, when police detective Pete Sebeck begins to
investigate them with the aid of itinerant computer consultant and
dedicated gamer Jon Ross, lead them to suspect that they are murders
orchestrated, for no immediately apparent motive, from beyond the grave
by Sobol, and carried out by processes,
daemons,
running on Internet-connected computers without the knowledge of the systems'
owners. When the FBI, called in due to their computer forensics resources, attempts
to raid Sobol's mansion, things go beyond catastrophically wrong, and it appears
they're up against an adversary which has resources and capabilities which
are difficult to even quantify and potential consequences for society which
cannot be bounded.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.Or maybe not. Before long evidence emerges that Sobol was the victim of a scam orchestrated by Sebeck and his mistress, conning Sobol, whose cognitive facilities were failing as his disease progressed, and setting up the Daemon as a hoax to make a fortune in the stock market as CyberStorm's stock collapsed. This neatly wraps up the narrative, which is just what the police, FBI, and NSA want, and Sebeck is quickly convicted and finds himself on death row for the murders he was accused of having orchestrated. Some involved in the investigation doubt that this ties up all the loose ends, but their superiors put the kibosh on going public with their fears for the time-tested reason of “avoiding public panic”. Meanwhile, curious things are happening in the worlds of online gaming, offshore Internet gambling and pornography businesses, pillars of the finance sector, media outlets, prisons, and online contract manufacturing. The plague of spam comes to an end in a cataclysmic event which many people on the receiving end may find entirely justified. As analysts at NSA and elsewhere put the pieces together, they begin to comprehend what they're up against and put together an above top secret task force to infiltrate and subvert the Daemon's activities. But in this wired world, it is difficult to keep anything off the record, especially when confronted by an adversary which, distributed on computers around the world, reading all Web sites and RSS feeds, and with its own stream of revenue and human agents which it rewards handsomely, is able to exert its power anywhere. It's a bit like God, when you think about it, or maybe what Google would like to become. What makes the Daemon, and this book, so devilishly clever is that, in the words of the NSA analyst on its trail, “The Daemon is not an Internet worm or a network exploit. It doesn't hack systems. It hacks society.” Indeed, the Daemon is essentially a role playing game engine connected to the real world, with the ability to reward those humans who do its bidding with real world money, power, and prestige, not virtual credits in a game. Consider how much time and money highly intelligent people with limited social skills currently spend on online multiplayer games. Now imagine if the very best of them were recruited to deploy their talents in the world outside their parents' basements, and be compensated with wealth, independence, and power over others. Do you think there would be a shortage of people to do the Daemon's bidding, even without the many forms of coercion it could bring to bear on those who were unwilling? Ultimately this book is about a phase change in the structure of human society brought about by the emergence of universal high bandwidth connectivity and distributed autonomous agents interacting with humans on an individual basis. From a pure Darwinian standpoint, might such a system be able to act, react, and mobilise resources so quickly and efficiently that it would run rings around the strongly hierarchical, coercive, and low bandwidth forms of organisation which have characterised human society for thousands of years? And if so, what could the legacy society do to stop it, particularly once it has become completely dependent upon the technologies which now are subverting and supplanting it?When I say the author gets it right, I'm not claiming the plot is actually plausible or that something like this could happen in the present or near future—there are numerous circumstances where a reader with business or engineering experience will be extremely sceptical that so many intricate things which have never before been tested on a full scale (or at all) could be expected to work the first time. After all, multi-player online games are not opened to the public before extensive play testing and revision based upon the results. But lighten up: this is a thriller, not a technological forecast, and the price of admission in suspension of disbelief is much the same as other more conventional thrillers. Where the book gets it right is that when discussing technical details, terminology is used correctly, descriptions are accurate, and speculative technologies at least have prototypes already demonstrated. Many books of this genre simply fall into the trap of Star Trek-like technobabble or endow their technological gadgets with capabilities nobody would have any idea how to implement today. In many stories in which technology figures prominently, technologically knowledgeable readers find themselves constantly put off by blunders which aren't germane to the plot but are simply indicative of ignorance or sloppiness on the part of the author; that doesn't happen here. One of the few goofs I noticed was in chapter 37 where one of the Daemon's minions receives “[a] new 3-D plan file … then opened it in AutoCAD. It took several seconds, even on his powerful Unix workstation.” In fact, AutoCAD has run only on Microsoft platforms for more than a decade, and that isn't likely to change. But he knows about AutoCAD, not to mention the Haas Mini Mill. The novel concludes with a rock 'em, sock 'em action scene which is going to be awe inspiring when this book is made into a movie. Rumour is that Paramount Pictures has already optioned the story, and they'll be fools if they don't proceed with production for the big screen. At the end of the book the saga is far from over, but it ends at a logical point and doesn't leave you with a cliffhanger. Fortunately, the sequel, Freedom™, is already out in hardcover and is available in a Kindle edition.Spoilers end here.
- Suarez, Daniel. Delta-v. New York: Dutton, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5247-4241-6.
- James Tighe is an extreme cave diver, pushing the limits of human endurance and his equipment to go deeper, farther, and into unexplored regions of underwater caves around the world. While exploring the depths of a cavern in China, an earthquake triggers disastrous rockfalls in the cave, killing several members of his expedition. Tighe narrowly escapes with his life, leading the survivors to safety, and the video he recorded with his helmet camera has made him an instant celebrity. He is surprised and puzzled when invited by billionaire and serial entrepreneur Nathan Joyce to a party on Joyce's private island in the Caribbean. Joyce meets privately with Tighe and explains that his theory of economics predicts a catastrophic collapse of the global debt bubble in the near future, with the potential to destroy modern civilisation. Joyce believes that the only way to avert this calamity is to jump start the human expansion into the solar system, thus creating an economic expansion into a much larger sphere of activity than one planet and allowing humans to “grow out” of the crushing debt their profligate governments have run up. In particular, he believes that asteroid mining is the key to opening the space frontier, as it will provide a source of raw materials which do not have to be lifted at prohibitive cost out of Earth's deep gravity well. Joyce intends to use part of his fortune to bootstrap such a venture, and invites Tighe to join a training program to select a team of individuals ready to face the challenges of long-term industrial operations in deep space. Tighe is puzzled, “Why me?” Joyce explains that much more important than a background in aerospace or mining is the ability to make the right decisions under great pressure and uncertainty. Tighe's leadership in rescuing his dive companions demonstrated that ability and qualified him to try out for Joyce's team. By the year 2033, the NewSpace companies founded in the early years of the 21st century have matured and, although taking different approaches, have come to dominate the market for space operations, mostly involving constellations of Earth satellites. The so-called “NewSpace Titans” (names have been changed, but you'll recognise them from their styles) have made their billions developing this industry, and some have expressed interest in asteroid mining, but mostly via robotic spacecraft and on a long-term time scale. Nathan Joyce wants to join their ranks and advance the schedule by sending humans to do the job. Besides, he argues, if the human destiny is to expand into space, why not get on with it, deploying their versatility and ability to improvise on this difficult challenge? The whole thing sounds rather dodgy to Tighe, but cave diving does not pay well, and the signing bonus and promised progress payments if he meets various milestones in the training programme sound very attractive, so he signs on the dotted line. Further off-putting were a draconian non-disclosure agreement and an “Indemnity for Accidental Death and Dismemberment” which was sprung on candidates only after arriving at the remote island training facility. There were surveillance cameras and microphones everywhere, and Tighe and others speculated they may be part of an elaborate reality TV show staged by Joyce, not a genuine space project. The other candidates were from all kinds of backgrounds: ex-military, former astronauts, BASE jumpers, mountaineers, scientists, and engineers. There were almost all on the older side for adventurers: mid-thirties to mid-forties—something about cosmic rays. And most of them had the hallmarks of DRD4-7R adventurers. As the programme gets underway, the candidates discover it resembles Special Forces training more than astronaut candidate instruction, with a series of rigorous tests evaluating personal courage, endurance, psychological stability, problem-solving skills, tolerance for stress, and the ability to form and work as a team. Predictably, their numbers are winnowed as they approach the milestone where a few will be selected for orbital training and qualification for the deep space mission. Tighe and the others discover that their employer is anything but straightforward, and they begin to twig to the fact that the kind of people who actually open the road to human settlement of the solar system may resemble the ruthless railroad barons of the 19th century more than the starry-eyed dreamers of science fiction. These revelations continue as the story unfolds. After gut-wrenching twists and turns, Tighe finds himself part of a crew selected to fly to and refine resources from a near-Earth asteroid first reconnoitered by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission in the 2010s. Risks are everywhere, and not just in space: corporate maneuvering back on Earth can kill the crew just as surely as radiation, vacuum, explosions, and collisions in space. Their only hope may be a desperate option recalling one of the greatest feats of seamanship in Earth's history. This is a gripping yarn in which the author confronts his characters with one seemingly insurmountable obstacle and disheartening setback after another, then describes how these carefully selected and honed survivors deal with it. There are no magical technologies: all of the technical foundations exist today, at least at the scale of laboratory demonstrations, and could plausibly be scaled up to those in the story by the mid-2030s. The intricate plot is a salutary reminder that deception, greed, dodgy finances, corporate hijinks, bureaucracy, and destructively hypertrophied egos do not stop at the Kármán line. The conclusion is hopeful and a testament to the place for humans in the development of space. A question and answer document about the details underlying the story is available on the author's Web site.
- Suarez, Daniel. Freedom™. New York: Signet, 2010. ISBN 978-0-451-23189-5.
- You'll see this book described as the sequel to the author's breakthrough first novel Daemon (August 2010), but in fact this is the second half of a long novel which happened to be published in two volumes. As such, if you pick up this book without having read Daemon, you will have absolutely no idea what is going on, who the characters are, and why they are motivated to do the things they do. There is little or no effort to fill in the back story or bring the reader up to speed. So read Daemon first, then this book, ideally not too long afterward so the story will remain fresh in your mind. Since that's the way the author treats these two books, I'm going to take the same liberty and assume you've read my review of Daemon to establish the context for these remarks. The last two decades have demonstrated, again and again, just how disruptive ubiquitous computing and broadband data networks can be to long-established and deeply entrenched industries such as book publishing and distribution, music recording and retailing, newspapers, legacy broadcast media, domestic customer service call centres, travel agencies, and a host of other businesses which have seen their traditional business models supplanted by something faster, more efficient, and with global reach. In this book the author explores the question of whether the fundamental governance and economic system of the last century may be next domino to fall, rendered impotent and obsolete and swept away by a fundamentally new way of doing things, impossible to imagine in the pre-wired world, based on the principles used in massively multiplayer online game engines and social networks. Of course, governments and multinational corporations are not going to go gently into the night, and the Daemon (a distributed mesh networked game engine connected to the real world) and its minions on the “darknet” demonstrate the ruthlessness of a machine intelligence when threatened, which results in any number of scenes just begging to be brought to the big screen. In essence, the Daemon is creating a new operating system for humans, allowing them to interact in ways less rigid, more decentralised and resilient, and less hierarchical than the institutions they inherited from an era when goods and information travelled no faster than a horse. In my estimation, this is a masterwork: the first compelling utopian/dystopian (depending on how you look at it, which is part of its genius) novel of the Internet era. It is as good, in its own way, as Looking Backward, Brave New World, or 1984, and it is a much more thrilling read than any of them. Like those classics, Suarez gets enough of the details right that you find yourself beginning to think that things might actually turn out something like this, and what kind of a world it would be to live in were that to happen. Ray Kurzweil argues that The Singularity Is Near. In this novel, the author gets the reader to wonder whether it might not be a lot closer than Kurzweil envisions, and not require the kind of exponential increase in computing power he assumes to be the prerequisite. Might the singularity—a phase transition in the organisation of human society as profound as the discovery of agriculture—actually be about to happen in the next few years, not brought about by superhuman artificial intelligence but rather the synthesis of and interconnection of billions of human intelligences connected by a “social network” encompassing all of society? (And if you think sudden transitions like that can't happen, just ask anybody who used to own a record store or the boss of a major newspaper.) Would this be a utopian solution to a system increasingly perceived as unsustainable and inexorably crushing individuality and creativity, or would it be a descent into a potentially irreversible dark age in which humans would end up as peripherals in a vast computing grid using them to accomplish its own incomprehensible agenda? You'll probably close this book undecided on that question, and spend a good deal of time afterward pondering it. That is what makes this novel so great. If the author can continue to rise to this standard in subsequent novels, we have a new grandmaster on the scene.
- Suarez, Daniel. Influx. New York: Signet, [2014] 2015. ISBN 978-0-451-46944-1.
- Doesn't it sometimes seem that, sometime in the 1960s, the broad march of technology just stopped? Certainly, there has been breathtaking progress in some fields, particularly computation and data communication, but what about clean, abundant fusion power too cheap to meter, opening up the solar system to settlement, prevention and/or effective treatment of all kinds of cancer, anti-aging therapy, artificial general intelligence, anthropomorphic robotics, and the many other wonders we expected to be commonplace by the year 2000? Decades later, Jon Grady was toiling in his obscure laboratory to make one of those dreams—gravity control— a reality. His lab is invaded by notorious Luddite terrorists who plan to blow up his apparatus and team. The fuse burns down into the charge, and all flashes white, then black. When he awakes, he finds himself, in good condition, in a luxurious office suite in a skyscraper, where he is introduced to the director of the Federal Bureau of Technology Control (BTC). The BTC, which appears in no federal organisation chart or budget, is charged with detecting potentially emerging disruptive technologies, controlling and/or stopping them (including deploying Luddite terrorists, where necessary), co-opting their developers into working in deep secrecy with the BTC, and releasing the technologies only when human nature and social and political institutions were “ready” for them—as determined by the BTC. But of course those technologies exist within the BTC, and it uses them: unlimited energy, genetically engineered beings, clones, artificial intelligence, and mind control weapons. Grady is offered a devil's bargain: join the BTC and work for them, or suffer the worst they can do to those who resist and see his life's work erased. Grady turns them down. At first, his fate doesn't seem that bad but then, as the creative and individualistic are wont to do, he resists and discovers the consequences when half a century's suppressed technologies are arrayed against a defiant human mind. How is he to recover his freedom and attack the BTC? Perhaps there are others, equally talented and defiant, in the same predicament? And, perhaps, the BTC, with such great power at its command, is not so monolithic and immune from rivalry, ambition, and power struggles as it would like others to believe. And what about other government agencies, fiercely protective of their own turf and budgets, and jealous of any rivals? Thus begins a technological thriller very different from the author's earlier Dæmon (August 2010) and Freedom™ (January 2011), but compelling. How does a band of individuals take on an adversary which can literally rain destruction from the sky? What is the truth beneath the public face of the BTC? What does a superhuman operative do upon discovering everything has been a lie? And how can one be sure it never happens again? With this novel Daniel Suarez reinforces his reputation as an emerging grand master of the techno-thriller. This book won the 2015 Prometheus Award for best libertarian novel.
- Suarez, Daniel. Kill Decision. New York: Signet, 2012. ISBN 978-0-451-41770-1.
- A drone strike on a crowd of pilgrims at one of the holiest shrines of Shia Islam in Iraq inflames the world against the U.S., which denies its involvement. (“But who else is flying drones in Iraq?”, is the universal response.) Meanwhile, the U.S. is rocked by a series of mysterious bombings, killing businessmen on a golf course, computer vision specialists meeting in Silicon Valley, military contractors in a building near the Pentagon—all seemingly unrelated. A campaign is building to develop and deploy autonomous armed drones to “protect the homeland”. Prof. Linda McKinney, doing research on weaver ants in Tanzania, seems far away from all this until she is saved from an explosion which destroys her camp by a mysterious group of special forces led by a man known only as “Odin”. She learns that her computer model of weaver ant colony behaviour has been stolen from her university's computer network by persons unknown who may be connected with the attacks, including the one she just escaped. The fear is that her ant model could be used as the basis for “swarm intelligence” drones which could cooperate to be a formidable weapon. With each individual drone having only rudimentary capabilities, like an isolated ant, they could be mass-produced and shift the military balance of power in favour of whoever possessed the technology. McKinney soon finds herself entangled in a black world where nothing is certain and she isn't even sure which side she's working for. Shocking discoveries indicate that the worst case she feared may be playing out, and she must decide where to place her allegiance. This novel is a masterful addition to the very sparse genre of robot ant science fiction thrillers, and this time I'm not the villain! Suarez has that rare talent, as had Michael Crichton, of writing action scenes which just beg to be put on the big screen and stories where the screenplay just writes itself. Should Hollywood turn this into a film and not botch it, the result should be a treat. You will learn some things about ants which you probably didn't know (all correct, as far as I can determine), visit a locale in the U.S. which sounds like something out of a Bond film but actually exists, and meet two of the most curious members of a special operations team in all of fiction.
