Kill Decision Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B008MT9ZVG | Format: EPUB
Kill Decision Description
The shocking techno-thriller that cements Daniel Suarez's status as the heir to Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy - a terrifying, breathtaking, and all-too-plausible vision of the world's near future.
Unmanned weaponized drones already exist: they're widely used by America in our war efforts in the Middle East. In Kill Decision, best-selling author Daniel Suarez takes that fact and the real science behind it one step further, with frightening results.
Linda McKinney is a myrmecologist, a scientist who studies the social structure of ants. Her academic career has left her entirely unprepared for the day her sophisticated research is conscripted by unknown forces to help run an unmanned - and thanks to her research, automated - drone army. Odin is the secretive Special Ops soldier with a unique insight into the faceless enemy who has begun to attack the American homeland with drones programmed to seek, identify, and execute targets without human intervention.
Together, McKinney and Odin must slow this advance long enough for the world to recognize its destructive power, because for thousands of years the "kill decision" during battle has remained in the hands of humans - and off-loading that responsibility to machines will bring unintended, possibly irreversible, consequences.
But as forces even McKinney and Odin don't understand begin to gather, and death rains down from above, it may already be too late to save humankind from destruction at the hands of our own technology.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours and 6 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: July 19, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008MT9ZVG
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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