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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining

Daemon 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

Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.

I 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.

Funny 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.

I'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.

Suarez used to be a tech/security consultant... the title is a direct reference to system daemons :)

Just 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.

I 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.

Which engineering decisions do you think were made in service of the plot?

This 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/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?

I 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.

100% 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.

I thought they were fairly enjoyable books but I didn't find the initial scenario at all plausible.

In same-same-but-different, I recommend "Walkaway" (Cory Doctorow) and "Nexus" (Rameez Nam).

I'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!

influx was really good!

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