Barrel Strength

Daniel Suarez’ “Daemon” marks a cunning sci-fi police procedural which turns into, simultaneously, a thrilling page-turner and a profound critique of capitalist society in its current computer-dependent state. What if I could get across an important techno-political treatise in the guise of a thriller? What if I could get across a chapter in Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, both of which are brilliant essays on of western warfare and political evolution, as a high-tech police procedural? What if Hobbes wrote Leviathan not as learned discourse on the nature of the state in Renaissance Europe, but as a high-tech science fiction thriller?

Several important writers have tried to tell us that the modern state is finished. But what do we mean by the word “state”? Bobbitt told us that the nation-state was passing into the market-state, which is where we are now. Basically this transition from nation-state to market-state signifies the withdrawal of the state from attempting to equalize outcomes, to one which tries to maximize your opportunities. Bobitt writes brilliantly. I recommend him. Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age also dealt with the nature of the world where nanotechnology has destroyed the basis of the nation-state, and I recommend him, too.

But Suarez is at an entirely more effective level of discourse because you are going to find him in the front of the airport book store before you get on your plane. You are going to be absorbed by the detective story that constitutes the beginning of the novel, and you are going to be increasingly impressed by how good it gets: how much more complex the implications, and how very cleverly he conveys his ideas about the obsolescence of our current governmental-economic structures. Why are they obsolescent? Because the uniformity of the machine-level at which all data is stored, configured, and manipulated has left us essentially as vulnerable as a wheat monoculture to rust, or a potato monoculture to blight.

The blight in question is the “daemon”. The genius inventor of multi-player immersive computer games, Mathew Sobol, has died, and his death causes a number of events to spring forth.  Essentially the daemon, a sophisticated program, takes over the IT departments of many large corporations as a parasite, and threatens the total evaporation of their records unless they comply with Mathew Sobol’s requirements. Sobol speaks through videos recorded before his death. He (in the form of computer-generated videos) asserts that he is the first man fully to realize the implications of computer insecurity and to exploit them in a comprehensive way. His daemon has become a parasite upon computer-dependent civilization, just as it was designed to be.

Don’t be put off by my praise: this is a fascinating book. Daniel Suarez has written something worth your attention.