Thomas

This book was written twenty years ago but the concepts are not dated. Hare developed the Hare Checklist for Psychopathy that has gained wider and wider acceptance as time has gone on. Your life has been touched by a psychopath/sociopath. The significance of that influence likely determines how interested you are in the subject. If your interest is high you must read this book as a seminal work on the subject. If your interest is somewhat lower, I would recommend the more recently written The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.

Daemon and Freedom together are the best speculative fiction story I have heard or read in years.

Spend enough time playing video games to become emotionally invested in the world of the game and you get a sense that there is an intelligence controlling it. Not something truly intelligent, just capable of determining the events in that world based on established rules.

If you played by the rules of the real world and extended technology into the real world, who is to say you couldn't turn reality into a game?

So many neat concepts in these books. The two primary antagonists are unequivocally beyond reason and beyond retribution. If you like concepts in your fiction that will have you pondering long after you've finished the book, this is a good one.

My favorite part of these two books was the ending. It was perfectly logical, but I really did not quite see it coming. Plus, it was very satisfying.

If you liked this book as a teenager then try some Richard K Morgan when you get a little older.

Written in the 1950s this book does not touch on the idea of Nuclear Winter which was hypothesized years later by Carl Sagan.

Look past that and you will see a story about how an apocalypse would effect a technological civilization. And that's a level of technology that is laughable by today's standards. It gives you a really visceral feeling of how much more vulnerable we are now.

I am a science fiction fan so the only reason I got this audiobook was that it is a 23 hour book that was on sale for $4.95. I do some work that occupies my hands and eyes but not my ears or mind so I snatched up a value like that.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the best audiobooks I have ever listened to! I have been listening to audiobooks for over 20 years, so that is a significant statement.

The story itself is very engaging but Humphrey Bower's narration turns a good book into a great audiobook.

It is worth the full or member price or a credit, but for heaven's sake if you ever see it on sale for $4.95 again, GRAB IT!!!!

This is the second book I have listened to narrated by Wil Wheaton (Ready Player One being the other) and I must say I am very impressed. The story here is quite good but in my opinion it was wrapped up a little too neatly in the end.

Truly eye-opening. You will realize that the a-holes that have been in your life are something fundamentally different than you thought they were. When you ask yourself "How could somebody do that?" you will now have an answer. Sociopathy seems to be the absence of three emotions - empathy, embarrassment and remorse. And this prevents any type of emotional attachment.

Society at large is blind to the sociopaths. After listening to this book I was watching the CBS show "Person of Interest". The protagonists of the show are trying to track down the former member of an East German death squad that used to travel the world murdering defectors. Based on the premise of this book you will see that these people could not simply be soldiers. To do something like that you would have to be a sociopath.

The plot thickened in that this guy was hunting down people for the murder of his wife, whom he had loved. It turns out she had betrayed him and was still alive. He hunted her down, but spared her life because he loved her.

None of that could happen. To be a death squad member you would have to be a sociopath. As a sociopath, you would be completely incapable of that type of emotional attachment.

The writers of the show made this guy fundamentally like the rest of us (except a "good soldier") either because they don't comprehend the difference between us and them or because they don't believe their audience would comprehend it or accept it.