the Onda

An observant friend recently heard me on a tear about the surge in historical fiction and commented that my one of my favorite genres, science fiction, was nothing more than forward-looking historical fiction. While this did not cause me to run out to read The Other Boleyn Girl, it did make me wonder why I like scifi so much while having so little patience for the Victorian era. The answer I believe, comes down to the fact that science fiction paints a world that might be rather than one that was, giving us a glimpse into what is around the next corner.

But if this is the metric for success, the science fiction that is closer— often not even called science fiction but other goofy names like "the techno thriller genre"— should appeal more to me. And indeed it often does so long as it doesn't suffer from the fact that it can get really tedious and boring. I remember first discovering the novels of Tom Clancy (which noone in their right mind would consider SF until you get into the military tech stuff he covers), only to be bored to tears by the fifth description of the classified radar system and the nth military acronym (Clancy should have worked at HP where the alphabet soup rages on).

I've just finished a book though which gets right to the core of what makes near term science fiction work really well; it is called Daemon and is written by Leinad Zeraus (more on that weird name later). I don't want to ruin the plot by writing about it here; suffice it to say that this is the best scifi/technothriller/whatever that I have read in a long time. The plot is spectacular, the characters are believable as hell, and best of all, the author starts from a landscape which is very much rooted in today's world and slowly brings in bits of the future in a way that is both believable and staves off the eventual Clancy-esque or Crichton-esque narration that ends up sounding like a parts list for what's hot in Popular Science this month.

During the first dot com boom, I ran into several folks who would brandish dog-eared copies of Snowcrash and talk about how the net was going to bring this world into being "very soon now." A decade later the world that Daemon paints to is much closer at hand. For instance (and this is the one plot spoiler): massively multiplayer online environments, GPS-based overlays into the physical world, hijacked servers, and private equity run amok all figure prominently in the plot— and the way in which they each do is imminently believable.

A word on the strangely named Leinad Zeraus. It turns out that this is the pseudonym of Daniel Suarez, a DB consultant in the Valley who self-published the book through Amazon's Lightning Source partnership. Of course you can't tell any of this from the end-to-end experience: the book can be seen on Amazon and comes via Prime looking like a standard paperback, but according to a recent piece I read in Wired, Suarez and his wife published it and used all sorts of good Web 2.0 tactics to get the word out (getting a pseudonym with good Google juice, reaching out to A-list bloggers) after being turned down by a bunch of folks in the "conventional" channel.

William Gibson is right after all: the future is here; it's just not widely distributed.

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