Currently reading
McGlue
Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Good Lord Bird
Ancillary Justice
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Dissident Gardens
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Complete Novels
This direct sequel to Daemon moves directly from that novel's closing premise: a baroquely-potent bot, designed by a nefarious and brilliant gaming programmer, has spread out into the web and begun building elaborate disruptions--and alternatives--to society. As the book closed, a secret government task force was ripped to smithereens by the bot's superior pre-programmed nefariosity and its legion of human acolytes and its swarms of scary independent sword-whirling motorcycles.That last sentence suggests the pleasures I took in the novel (the sly no-exit narrative shenanigans--you can't beat the super-programmer!) and its limits (I'm not much taken by the technophiliac tedium of long passages describing hardware and violent mayhem).
How would Freedom ring? Well, it does one brilliant thing: it turns the good/bad dichotomy of the first novel on its head. As the novel progresses, Suarez takes frequent sidetrips into discussions (informed explicitly by Naomi Klein, James Bamford, and others) of a techno-corporate oligarchy -- all lined up against the Daemon, seeking to use its destruction as cover for their own takeover of the last dregs of freedom around the globe. At its best, the book has a delirious anti-corporate fervor woven right into its ripping yarn, and I love the ambitious subversion of sequel expectations, reconceptualizing the villain as a kind of hero.
That said, the novel is way, way, way too schematic in its thriller mechanics, 'cause once the reconceptualization happens it's just a matter of white and black hats pulling out their guns (or, rather, pulling out their vast arrays of cybernetic metastaticomputationalcoded software and hardware) for big big bloody fights.
I got a bit bored with all that.
Still, I like a pop thriller with a bibliography and a lot on its mind.