The Strake ( ? )

Mini Book Review: Daemon

DDOS attack, trojan horse, NSA, kernal rootkit, bukkake, packet sniffer, Oakenfold, Triple DES encryption, rave, 3D graphics engine, DARPA, Fuckmeister Shitfest, screen scraper, Nazi, MPEG.

All of these words and phrases can be found in Daemon, a novel by Jeinad Zeraus.

I read a lot. I almost always have two or three books and/or magazines that I’m actively reading. Lately, though, I’ve really had trouble finding any fiction that has kept my attention. There have been several novels that I’ve picked up over the past couple of years that I really wanted to like, but I couldn’t focus long enough to get through the first few chapters.

I read the first seven chapters of Daemon online after reading a glowing blog post review somewhere by a seemingly competent techie. I immediately bought the book and didn’t come up for air for about four days. I haven’t been so wrapped up in a book in a long time.

The premise starts off simple: a genius game developer becomes terminally ill and spends his last couple of years building a daemon program that sits around parsing online feeds and looking for news of his death. Once the program determines that he has died, it kicks off a series of automated events that lead to the death of a couple old co-workers. Authorities are then faced with an interesting dilemma: a murder suspect who is already dead.

What makes the story so great is that the author himself is an IT consultant and has written the book so that even hardcore geeks will appreciate it. There’s no Hollywood computer movie bullshit - the events in the book are quite plausible, if not today then very soon.

Daemon = DaVinci Code + The Matrix + Fight Club