Kill Decision Author: Daniel Suarez | Language: English | ISBN:
B0073XV2W2 | Format: PDF
Kill Decision Description
From the New York Times Bestselling author of Daemon comes a terrifying, breathtaking,and all-too-plausible vision of the world's near future.
It's no secret that America relies on remotely piloted drones to target adversaries overseas. But now fifty other nations are developing drones of their own, and the next generation of unmanned weapons are much scarier: autonomous drones that acquire and destroy targets without direct human intervention.
Bestselling author Daniel Suarez--dubbed the "heir to Michael Crichton" by Publishers Weekly - imagines--a shocking but all-too-possible world of autonomous swarming drones and the dawn of anonymous warfare with his new tech-thriller Kill Decision.
In Kill Decision, Linda McKinney is a myrmecologist whose research focuses on African weaver ants--one of the most organized and aggressive species on earth. The chemical-based communication of weaver ants allows vast colonies to act as a single, collective intelligence, killing anything that enters their territory. What McKinney doesn't know is that her research has been stolen by unknown forces who have co-opted her software model to power an army of autonomous swarming drones--and recent attacks on the U.S. homeland indicate where that swarm might be released.
Saved from a drone attack herself by a secretive Special Ops soldier known as Odin, McKinney is suddenly propelled into a war she never dreamed existed. Together, McKinney and Odin must slow the spread of these swarming weapons long enough for the world to recognize their destructive power--and stay alive long enough to discover who is behind them.
McKinney knows the stakes go far beyond her own fate. For thousands of years the 'kill decision' in war has been in human hands, and offloading that responsibility to mass-produced, insect-like machines would bring unintended, possibly irreversible, consequences for us all.
A cutting-edge thriller with important contemporary relevance, Kill Decision is an adrenaline-filled page-turner that will shock readers
with its realism and frightening plausibility.
- File Size: 651 KB
- Print Length: 513 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0451417704
- Publisher: Dutton Adult; Reprint edition (July 19, 2012)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0073XV2W2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,334 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Daniel Suarez has done it again (Daemon, Freedom). He's written the tech thriller of the year.
He's managed to get his mind around the most complex and terrifying military technology of our time, DRONES, and turn it into a thriller that will keep on the edge of your seat.
What is a drone and why is it terrifying? It's a flying robot that can kill with precision. Drones are currently being used across the world from Pakistan to Yemen to the Philippines, to continuously watch and kill people. Already, thousands of people are being killed by drones each year, and that number will rapidly grow beyond everyone's expectations. Why? Moore's law. Drones are going to get very cheap and very smart much faster than anyone anticipates (in the same way cell phones and personal computers got cheap and powerful). That means they will be many, many more of them, used very often, in a plethora of places.
This is where Dan Suarez steps in. He takes this lethal technology and projects it forward in a way that feels right. Why? He (rightly) uses myrmecology (the study of ants, think E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition) as his pattern for the evolution of drone technology.
Daniel Suarez's first two novels, Daemon and Freedom (tm), turned me into a fan. Therefore, I was excited to learn of the publication of a new stand-alone thriller. I did not find Kill Decision to be as strong as Suarez's prior novels, but I'm still a fan. I can't help it; I'm a sucker for smart fiction.
This time around, Suarez is writing about the threat of autonomous drones being used by the military. After several opening scenes which illustrate the dangers of these devices, the story builds around a military man on a secret mission to investigate a series of drone attacks on U.S. soil and a scientist who gets caught up in the action. She researches ant behavior--but it seems that her pure research has other, darker applications. Now these two are teamed up with, well, a team. They need to stay alive, stop the drone attacks, and hopefully get the military to see that machines can't be trusted to make life or death decisions.
Now, that's a fairly sparse synopsis coming from me, and you may have noticed that I used no names. I didn't really see the point. The characters were so superficially drawn that I could barely remember who the supporting characters were, and the male and female protagonists were awfully generic as well. I have to admit that I had a very hard time caring about them or getting invested in their story. Plus, they all had ridiculous monikers like Odin, Mooch, and Foxy. (Or you'd have a character nicknamed Ripper interacting with a character named Ritter. Do you really need to make things that difficult, Mr. Suarez?)
And it wasn't merely the characters that had a generic feel about them; some of the dialogue was downright cringe-worthy. An example: at one point the lady scientist asks the military man why he's drawn to war.
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