Very very gripping books, don’t read on if you’d rather avoid spoilers…
WIFI WPA hacks, phone tracking, drones, armies of self-driving cars, hypersonic weapons, plasma weapons, distributed software able to kill people remotely, GPS-enabled glasses with augmented reality overlay controlled by motion-detection gloves… Stealth processes running on unreachable servers in China scanning RSS feeds for a text pattern and sending instructions when a match is found, therefore reacting to events in real-time... People and machines controlled using basic AI available in computer games, a bit like a giant SimCity or a lethal MMORPG where the player is a program and characters are actual people… Encrypted APIs allowing whoever decrypts it to wipe out a company’s entire data backup just by passing the company name as a function argument… entire companies fall under the control of an unstoppable distributed computer program whose mad creator died before triggering it. It recruits people through coercion at first until it grows powerful enough to be the best employer in a country ravaged by 25% unemployment. It’s a computer program that kills spammers, hedge fund managers and anything that gets in its way and simultaneously builds self-sufficient communities based on renewable energy and sustainable farming…
What makes this book powerful is that everything is based on technology available now. There is little that the author made up, it all exists. You end up thinking: that could happen if someone smart with unlimited funds decided to put his mind to it (Eric Schmidt maybe?). Of course a lot of the tech in the book works a little too well. Suarez’ technique consists in taking a bunch of technologies currently in the R&D stage and imagine what would happen if they actually were fully developed. This is the kind of sci-fi I like: grounded, realistic, credible and very very close to us.
You could make such a good film out of this plot… There is enough material to build a very cool tech action-thriller trilogy.
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