Book Review: Freedom by Daniel Suarez (Book 2 of the Daemon Series)
I read Book 1 of the “Daemon” Series, about a year ago. It was good enough for me to get the sequel as soon as I learned about it. The Daemon series is about a daemon computer program, essentially a non-AI cyber attack software written by a genius video and VR game designer that is launched posthumously against key parts of the global technology and politico-economic system. It is the story of a seemingly invincible software against the system, but it is also a story of how individual human beings empowered by new tech pathways can band together to fight against impersonal corporate interests to which they’ve become subjected to.
Book 2 (Freedom) which we’re reviewing here, expands the story to when individuals band around the services set up by the Daemon to build a techno-utopia answer to the ills of the current system, and corporations that have been handicapped by the Daemon’s attacks attempt to fight back or take control of the Daemon for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the government and national security services are pre-occupied with the myriads of financial and political stresses as well as attempting to curtail – in their own way – the Daemon and its activities.
What happens when these powerful corporates clash with these Darknet communities trying to set up a grass-roots participatory democracy that they hope would do better than current economic and democratic systems? Would the corporations succeed in co-opting the Daemon? Would the Darknet communities also succumb to their own form of concentration of power? Or would the Darknet communities be the start of better market system that helps more people?
There seems to be a time jump between Book 1 and 2, during which the Daemon has amassed supporters and followers communicating primarily via an off-main grid augmented reality (AR) social network. Meanwhile, corporate operators led by a man called the Major, are trying to infiltrate this Darknet in order to bring it down. Going against the Major and his corporate multinational professional mercenaries is Loki, a highly rated Darknet operative whose knack for mayhem with sword-wielding autonomous motorbikes rivals the Major’s ruthlessness.
The plot and premise of Freedom is straightforward, and could probably be told in a few pages, but it’s full of ideas and packed nicely by interesting socio-economic raison d’etre by the Darknet members. For a Scifi novel that seems to stress-test the more than a dozen ways technocratic economic systems can fail or be compromised, more ideas is better than less. This dialogue is also handled well, and I think most readers will have only a few moments where they wonder if that’s the characters’ opinions or the author channeling his own leanings. But an actual issue I had with Freedom is that based on which character’s POV the author employed in a chapter or section, you could tell who or what some unpleasant action was about to happen to, which limited the element of surprise for the reader.
Most of the main characters in Freedom are the law enforcement or operative types. There are also mercenaries, and many ordinary people characters trying to better their lot through this new dark net and the resources the Daemon provides. Sobol, the deceased game designer creator of the Daemon, maintains his presence throughout the story through holographic images of himself that are projected at various points of the Daemon “game” to speak with people. There are alternative holographic presentations based on the choices of the participants in the Daemon “game”.
The science fiction here is how one person or even an army of programmers could think of all possible outcomes in human behavior and create fitting responses to each, without a sophisticated AI but just what amounts to very good if else programs. Because, when the Daemon is launched, Sobol is dead. So the Daemon is then running autonomously: recruiting human operatives, setting up its infrastructure, managing the nuances of its operations, and responding to attacks by some of the best in the game.
Compared to Book 1, Book 2 deals more with the persons working with and for the Daemon, and while I don’t think you need to have read Book 1 to enjoy Book 2, you definitely need to read Book 1 if you want the specifics of how the Daemon code was written and how it operates. I must admit this book series very much relies on the presumption of science fiction to accept the Daemon as plausible in this otherwise quite realistic novel. Nevertheless, the Daemon series is a very creative and fresh take on cyberpunk.