Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Daemon (Daemon, Bk 1)

Daemon (Daemon, Bk 1)
SteveTheDM avatar reviewed on + 204 more book reviews


This is the story of a distributed (virus-like) daemon left behind by a genius, "mad scientist"-style video game designer. What is a "daemon", you ask? "Daemon" is a compute process that runs on a computer, usually to do things like monitor system state and report when things go wrong. They also form the core of on-demand services like email. Web servers are daemons.

In any event, our mad-scientist wrote a daemon that sat quietly, patiently watching news websites for his obituary. And when that finally appeared, things go berserk.

The book tells the story of the local police trying to figure out what the heck is going on, eventually getting into a lone cop who believes it's a computer program and the rest of the force thinking a computer program left behind by a dead guy couldn't possibly be making things happen.

It goes far beyond that, though, and gets quite crazy.

I loved this book. It's near-future IT suspense. It's crazy shenanigans that are just plausible enough to be believed. It also plays in the world of my expertise, and that's always fun.

5 of 5 stars.