Tech Terrors of Tomorrow

Daniel Suarez appearing in London

In addition to feeding my Stieg Larsson addiction, Quercus publicist Nicci Praça recognizes my fondness for techno-thriller fiction. So she was kind enough to send me a copy of American writer Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, which was released earlier in the year in the States, but just reached British shores this spring. When it comes to novels that alter my perception of reality, Daemon definitely delivers. It was odd at first to see Suarez likened to Neal Stephenson and the late, great Michael Crichton--authors whose work has permanently stained my mind over the years. Fortunately, though, such comparisons aren’t without merit. Not only is Daemon a violent and thought-provoking work of thriller fiction, but it’s a loud warning about the threats posed by “bot nets.”

My receipt of Daemon could hardly have come at a better time. I’d just finished a fascinating collection of essays titled Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by academic scientist and literature graduate David Eagleman. He’d been inspired to write that book after engaging in a rather surreal e-mail exchange with a colleague. Apparently, Eagleman had sent this person a note asking him to contribute to a scientific project. The message he received in response went something like this:

David,

Thank you for your request, and as much as I would like to participate in the project you outlined, unfortunately I died two weeks ago, so I will be unable to contribute. However, if there are other questions or projects that I may be able to contribute to in the future, please feel free to contact me, or extract what you need from my life’s work that is archived online at the following locations ... or contact my agent, who is managing my estate.

Again I appreciate your interest in my work,

Dr. XXXXXX

Digging further, Eagleman discovered the existence of businesses that, for a fee, will manage your “online” persona, faithfully updating your Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace pages, as well as your blogs, after you pass away. This they accomplish with the help of sophisticated botnets and robotic algorithmic programs. (I was so blown away by this enterprise, that at CrimeFest earlier this month, I engaged authors Declan Burke and Steve Mosby in a very late, beer-fueled discussion on the subject of botnets--a conversation about which Burke later wrote in his blog.)

That same sort of technology--computer programs that run continuously in the background and perform specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events--lies ominously at the center of the plot in Daemon. (The title is a condensation of the term Disk And Execution MONitor.) In Suarez’s story things have taken a decidedly peculiar turn, for as time progresses and technology motors on (fueled by Moore’s Law), it becomes harder to distinguish a “real” human being from a robot, or someone who may be dead in real life but remains “alive” online.

Daemon opens after the brain-cancer death of a highly successful gaming software producer, Mathew Sobol. He was the force behind Cyberstorm, a company that found its sales niche in the world of “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPG). After introducing such profitable entertainments as The Gate and its predecessor, Over the Rhine, Cyberstorm has become a major user of Internet bandwidth, inviting millions of people to escape their reality and venture into exotic worlds on the Web. But the company’s progress is about to come to a screeching halt. It seems that Sobol wasn’t a very nice person, and his passing has automatically unleashed a connected array of botnet programs designed to wreak havoc. Their electronic tentacles creep out through Cyberstorm’s hosted servers as well as from hidden corners of the Internet. The intersection between reality and cyber-reality blurs, and as it does, Sobol’s botnets start killing people and sabotaging the “real world.” Having to deal with the consequences of all this is a large array of distinctive characters, among them down-on-her luck TV anchorwoman Anji Anderson, aging British actor Lionel Crawley, and the detective team headed by Peter Sebeck and his software consultant, Jon Ross.

If you can’t tell already, I was captivated by Daemon. Written in a frantic, what-the-hell-could-go-wrong-next style, and blessedly light on the techno-babble, it’s a powerhouse of a novel that tingles the imagination at the same time as it warns against heedless technological advancement.

After finishing the book, I was pleased to learn that author Suarez was due to visit London and talk with a few selected journalists about his mind-bending tale.

I met the 44-year-old Suarez at his London hotel, where he had kindly organized coffee and a quiet table at which we could chat. He laughed as I explained that I’d left my trusty tape machine at home in error, so would be exercising a few creaky mental and physical muscles to take notes about our conversation. We talked for a while about our common histories as writers, scientists, and businessmen. (Suarez has “designed and developed enterprise software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries.”) I learned that the author came originally from a family of six children in New Jersey, and he contracted the writing and reading bugs from his father. Suarez relocated to America’s West Coast to pursue his interests in the world of relational databases and consulting, and has now lived in California for many years.

When I got to talking about David Eagleman’s Sum, Suarez was not only intrigued, but explained that Daemon started from a similar place. Reporter Claudine Beaumont, who had come to join us at our table, later related Suarez’s story in The Daily Telegraph:

The epiphany for Suarez came in the late 1990s when he was writing a program called Weather Master, which created weather patterns for fictional worlds. He sold the program online, offering users a free 30-day trial before they had to buy the software. Payments were automatically swept in to an account, which Suarez left unchecked for several months. When he finally did remember to see how much money had accrued, he was struck by the strangeness of the situation.

“I realised--if I kicked the bucket, this thing would keep going, all automated. In modern society, a lot of what we do is impersonal, you’re not present. It’s really almost an avatar of yourself carrying out these transactions,” he recalls.

“It really played on my mind and I started to consider the outcomes. That’s when I started to get alarmed, and noticing more and more in my work that everything is being connected and it’s being done so to maximise efficiency.”

Efficiency, says Suarez, is all well and good, but there’s a fundamental need to balance it with a robustness and resilience that means society can benefit from the interoperability of systems without ever becoming entirely reliant on a single set-up.

As our conversation went on, we reached the subject of Suarez’s start as a novelist. Now, we often hear horror stories about self-publishing and the “vanity press.” Only occasionally is there an example of a writer who went that unconventional route, and managed to succeed. Suarez is one of those authors. The idea for Daemon began gestating in his mind in 1999, after he’d earned a college degree in English Literature, but he didn’t actually begin writing his book until 2002. Working on it in his spare time, he finally finished the manuscript two years later. “Look,” he told me, “I was a busy guy but the idea for Daemon kept nagging at me; and in fact as the book mushroomed in terms of scale and size, up to 140,000 words, I realized I was writing this for myself.” Once he completed the work, though, he figured he might as well try to get it published. So he put in another year seeking a literary agent. Everybody told him the novel would need shortening, so he cut Daemon down to 100,000 words. But even then, he was unable to land a publishing deal.

So he decided to produce Daemon as a print-on-demand (POD) novel through a company called Lightning Source. In December 2006, Daemon was brought out under the pseudonym Leinad Zeraus, and went on to sells “in the hundreds,” which was OK with Suarez; he was just happy to have it done and available to the curious.

However, things suddenly changed two years ago, as reported by Wired magazine:

[I]n April 2007, Rick Klau, head of publisher services at [the Web feed management provider] FeedBurner, got a copy. Two things happened: Google acquired FeedBurner, and Klau, electrified by Daemon’s all-too-plausible IT scenario, began pushing the book on anyone who would listen.

“I just felt it would be a travesty if a lot of people didn’t read it,” Klau says. A new colleague at Google, algorithm wrangler Matt Cutts, gave Daemon a shout-out on his blog. Cyberwar pundit John Robb mentioned it on his site, and [Japanese entrepreneur Joi] Ito wrote that it was “believable and realistic and still mind-blowing.” [author-editor Stewart] Brand blurbed it on Amazon, saying Suarez was “better than early Tom Clancy.” ... “When I finished the book,” Brand says, “my feeling was that the sequel is not only desirable, but necessary.”

As favorable word-of-mouth about Daemon spread, close to 4,000 copies of the book were soon brought into print. Suarez finally managed to find an agent, and a film-rights option was purchased by U.S. producer Walter F. Parkes (Men in Black, The Kite Runner). Suarez says that the movie version of Daemon is currently in “pre-production,” and though he has high hopes, he’s familiar with the vagaries of the Hollywood machine.

Suarez kindly ordered more coffee, and we talked about the central premise and principal threat contained in Daemon: the increasing use of botnets on the Internet and within software architecture. I remarked to Suarez that much of the Internet is held together by kids working with “sticky-tape and chewing gum,” which caused him to roar with laughter. He provided me with this link to a YouTube video, which finds him offering a fascinating overview of the threat.

I asked him about that Daemon sequel Stewart Brand suggested. Suarez laughed again and explained that such a sequel has all ready been written. Because his original manuscript was so long, he basically cut it into two volumes, with Daemon being Part I. The follow-up, Freedom, is anticipated in 2010.

As we said our good-byes, I was struck by how modest Suarez has remained, despite his recent publishing success. Too often, authors become swell-headed after receiving contracts and being courted by the media. None of that seems to have happened to Daniel Suarez. Let’s hope it doesn’t in the future--whether good or bad.

If you’d like to sample a slice of Daemon for yourself, click here.