In that this review is coming off the heels of Tcharkovsky and his Space Operas full of sentient creatures, we might need to start this reflection with an understanding that sci-fi really is a big umbrella with lots of different things in it. There is sci-fi that looks far off to the future, and there is sci-fi that makes you nervously think that it could happen tomorrow. Of the latter camp, Daniel Suarez really is very good, and maybe the best in that field.
But you do have to also accept that in the ephemera that is genre, he is also a pulpy writer of thrillers. His books are right at home next to those Dan Brown’s and Steig Larsons that you hide with a little shame behind the Thomas Pynchon novels you read in your 20’s.
Just kidding. I wouldn’t hide Daniel Suarez’s books.
Suarez can be looked at as a very bare bones, very basic writer. He takes a technology and adds (for lack of a better word) ‘plotty’ elements. This book is about autonomous drones able to make ‘Kill Decisions”. You can probably now guess large swatches of the plot.
Is there a shadowy government agency? A kinda hapless, out of their element protagonist who doesn’t initially get why they are involved even though we do?
Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing exactly.
The book does have actual faults. The prose is, as mentioned before, pulpy. And boy, does it ever show. Nothing you will read here is going to make you say ‘wow, now that’s a great sentence’. Some of the plot choices are also very pulpy, as when the two protagonists decide to have sex in a scene that really made me feel like a publisher insisted he throw it in simply because it was on a checklist of things your average pulp thriller just kind of needs. It felt like it had no place whatsoever in this story. There were moments in this book, more than some of the others I have read in Suarez’ work, that felt like he was writing from a deep seated confidence that some movie studio was going to auction this. It was the romance, but it was the scene were the protagonists jump out of an airplane while being chased by drones that are targeting them via unknown means.
I wouldn’t hide Suarez’ Daemon. It’s one of the books I shove into people’s hand while I make them promise me that they’ll read it. Or so I felt when I first read it. I had that feeling a bit with this one, but maybe the wonder and novelty is wearing off.
Failures in Polymathy 