perfidy

I'm reading Daemon, by Daniel Suarez.  At about a third of the way through this book, I am totally blown away.  This is the most fucked up, fascinating thriller I have ever read.  I pray, pray, pray that the rest of the book lives up to what I've read so far.

I make my living in the IT world.  I read the tech press, I play with the toys, I use the tools of the information age to support my family.  As do many thousands of others in this world.  It has been a constant irritant, a thorn in my eye, that movies and books - even especially science fiction movies and books - consistently, thoroughly and unaccountably get the computer stuff utterly and gallingly wrong.  I could spend a week citing examples just from movies of the last five years.  But I won't, for your sake.  Because I am a benevolent and loving blogger.

I will admit that part of the reason is that computer technology - as it is instantiated in the really real world - is dull as ditchwater, and less exciting to watch than drying paint.  If you are attempting to put IT center screen, in a movie especially it will need to be jazzed up.  But everywhere else, we have fake operating systems, ridiculous dialog, implausibility stacked upon ridiculousness.

So it's a pet peeve of mine.

And that is the reason why Daemon so rocks[1. assuming it doesn't fall apart in the next chapter].  Suarez gets the tech; and all the tech in the book is plausible, compelling, and put together in really fascinating and creepy ways.  It's like Tom Clancy channelling Charlie Stross - it doesn't have the humor and quirkiness and density of Stross' best work, but like Halting State or Glasshouse, the underlying ideas are the kind of scary that comes from being solidly based in reality; and given the fallen nature of man, almost certainly inevitable.

I'll update this when I finish, but for now I just had to share how much I'm enjoying the ride.

[wik] Finished the book.  It got better.  Only downside, it finishes on a cliffhanger.  Happily, though, I waited to read it until just after the release of Volume II, Freedom™.  I will be purchasing that directly.