Daniel Suarez

A friend of mine is a big fan of Daemon by Daniel Suarez (initially self-published as Leinad Zeraus). She's been telling me to read the book for awhile and since he was giving a talk locally today, we went to listen to the talk.

It's a little strange to go to a talk by an author you've never read I guess (and I haven't read any of his books), but nicely there was no mention of book spoilers. He introduced the book and then told an anecdote about why he decided to publish his book as Leinad Zeraus. Apparently, it was so that searching for him on Google would be easier, which I found to be a pretty entertaining reason.

He also talked about getting the inspiration for the book from writing a piece of code that just ran by itself and automatically deposited money onto his account. "I could die and it would still be running". That got him thinking about what else he could do while being dead and apparently that is the idea for the book: a programmer leaves a computer system to wreak havoc after he dies.

I found the talk agreeable until the end when someone asked him whether he considers his work science fiction as it is similar in genre to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Unfortunately, his response was that his book is NOT science fiction because what he writes about could happen and doesn't involve star drives and whatnot. Ugh, yet another author writing what is essentially science fiction, or at the very least speculative fiction and looking down on the genre at the same time.

There was a book give-away at the end of the talk, so now I've got a signed copy of the book added to my to-read pile. I hope it makes for some good reading.