FREEDOM ™ By Daniel Suarez

Cybergeddon

If you’re not playing the game. The game is playing you.

A fitting ending the Daemon story. This is in truth a horror novel. Unlike the undead zombies or immortal vampires and urban wizards that are so popular in horror fiction today, this story is horrific because it has the legitimacy of plausibility. Having lived through the dawn of the internet and witnessing its pervasive influence of the lives of people, it is not much of a leap to imagine just such a scenario that this novel puts forth becoming a reality; that makes this very frightening. Thankfully Suarez gifts us with a rousing thriller along with dishing out a look at the future of cyber-terror.

Lest it seem that this book is depressing let me impress upon you that the threat of cyber-terror is countered with the potential of cyber-altruism. It only takes a short search to discover the vast effort people today put into offering their opinion and knowledge in uncompensated internet postings and web-sites. I, for one, am not as optimistic as some of the characters in this book. I see the not only the people posting free information on the internet, I also see the spammers, mal-ware coders, and virus crackers that infest cyber-space as the best indicator of the way this story would play out in reality. If we had a twisted computer genius bent on fundamentally transforming human society like the Matthew Sobel in this book, the ending would not be happy.  

As with the previous novel in this series, DAEMON, Jeff Gurner is amazing. He makes this sound like an action movie playing in your head. And like a great movie that you watch over and over, I will be listening to this again. Maybe I’ll wait until my computer crashes from the next virus. It won’t be long.

Here are some related titles in the Cyber-Thriller-SF-Gaming genre you might enjoy:

READY PLAYER ONE  by Ernest Cline.

TERMINAL EXPERIMENT by Robert J. Sawyer

SNOWCRASH by Neal Stephenson