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I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
by NikolaeVarius 6y ago
I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
- RangerScience 6y agoIn same-same-but-different, I recommend "Walkaway" (Cory Doctorow) and "Nexus" (Rameez Nam).
- mrslave 6y agoI'll take these as unsolicited strong recommendations for my next sci-fi novel reading, as I'm just finishing the Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Thank you!
- superkuh 6y agoDaemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
- Barrin92 6y agoI found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.
- ppf 6y agoFunny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.
- mwcampbell 6y agoI've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.
- RangerScience 6y agoSuarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)
- varjag 6y agoJust read it off your recommendation here. It's not a hard scifi unless you'd think Transformers also are. Some really far fetched sysadmin fiction.
- mdorazio 6y ago100% agree that Daemon and Freedom are top-class plausible hard sci-fi, which is surprisingly hard to come by. On the other hand, I didn't much care for Influx.
- arethuza 6y agoI thought they were fairly enjoyable books but I didn't find the initial scenario at all plausible.
- Setheck 6y agoinflux was really good!
- zokier 6y agoThis Amazon review doesn't seem too promising, and there were few others that echoed the same sentiment. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6V?ref=pf_vv_at_pdctrvw_srp https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07FLX8V84/R1CKDTZCNU5E6... How do you feel about the non-tech parts of the novel? Does it get soapboxy or cartoony, or does it hold a sensible tone?
- RangerScience 6y agoI found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.
- Symmetry 6y agoI appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the book unenjoyable for me.
- RangerScience 6y agoWhich engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?