I started reading Daniel Suarez’s Daemon after I got it for Christmas, but haven’t finished yet. I put Kill Decision on hold at the library and when it became available it sounded good so I jumped in.
The cover says “A Thriller” and it delivers. The book starts off following a Special Ops soldier and a Stanford Computer Science grad student on the verge of releasing a startup idea. The book then moves on to center around a myrmecologist studying weaver ants and their social patterns (Trust me, it’s way more interesting than it sounds).
From start to finish the book is a stream of action and twisting-turning scenarios. As Suarez says in a video interview I blogged before having a character in the US military allows him to do things that normal characters wouldn’t be able to do like go in and out of different countries easily and have access to equipment and resources that civilians don’t.
[ SPOILERS AHEAD ]
The book focuses on Odin’s (special ops guy) operation to get to the bottom of bombings that have been happening in the continental U.S. and in the process saves Linda McKinney from an attack by a UAV drone.
Odin’s team and a reluctant McKinney then travel from Africa to the US, to South East Asia following the trail of the mysterious group behind the bombings which are actually drone assassinations that are covered up as to not cause widespread panic.
The main topic that Suarez sheds light on is a very possible future of a proliferation of drones that are lethal and autonomous. What does national security, warfare, and diplomacy look like in a time where every country has access to these machines?
