Current reading

I’ve found Daniel Suarez’ Daemon pretty satisfying on several levels, not the least of which are the stoking of my schadenfreudian and conspiracy-detecting proclivities. Suarez (who has been taken seriously by a lot of smart people) seems to get a lot of things about the world as it seems-to-be-going right enough to raise the hairs on the back of the neck every few pages, and here and there he comes through with bits of insight that link domains in novel ways. One case in point mixes digital geekery with mythology and folklore:

The mythmakers… were the ones who invented rhyme and meter –the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum –a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. (pg 600)

And so, having finished Daemon, I’ve ordered its just-published sequel Freedom, and confidently expect it to be as gripping and prescient.

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