Influx

By: Daniel Suarez

Narrated by: Jeff Gurner

Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

What if our civilization is more advanced than we know?

The New York Times best-selling author of Daemon - "the cyberthriller against which all others will be measured" (Publishers Weekly) - imagines a world in which decades of technological advances have been suppressed in an effort to prevent disruptive change.

Are smartphones really humanity's most significant innovation since the moon landings? Or can something else explain why the bold visions of the 20th century - fusion power, genetic enhancements, artificial intelligence, cures for common diseases, extended human life, and a host of other world-changing advances - have remained beyond our grasp? Why has the high-tech future that seemed imminent in the 1960s failed to arrive?

Perhaps it did arrive…but only for a select few.

Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they've been working toward for years: A device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionize the field of physics - the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel Prize. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring. This Bureau of Technology Control uses the advanced technologies they have harvested over the decades to fulfill their mission.

They are living in our future.

Presented with the opportunity to join the BTC and improve his own technology in secret, Grady balks, and is instead thrown into a nightmarish high-tech prison built to hold rebellious geniuses like himself. With so many great intellects confined together, can Grady and his fellow prisoners conceive of a way to usher humanity out of its artificial dark age?

And when they do, is it possible to defeat an enemy that wields a technological advantage half a century in the making?

©2014 Daniel Suarez (P)2014 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"You'll hear a lot of reviewers compare Suarez to [Michael] Crichton, including me for his previous book Kill Decision. And Suarez deserved the honor in the truest sense...he had achieved a truly Crichton-level of storytelling. But with Influx, Suarez becomes the master, and Crichton is the one who is honored by the comparison." (Stephen L. Macknik, Scientific American)

"[Influx is] done with the dazzling sophistication, the play of ideas, the hints of a new understanding almost within our grasp that characterize sci-fi in the cybertronic age." (The Wall Street Journal)

“With this terrifying thriller, Suarez provides further support for the proposition that he’s a worthy successor to the late Michael Crichton… Suarez once again mixes science and fiction perfectly.”(Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Entertaining Physics SciFi

Influx is a fun read, though not as gripping as his Daemon series. The first half of the book is slower paced with a lot of technical information, but the pacing picks up in the 2nd half with the exciting action we've come to expect from Suarez.

The world of Influx is not as strongly developed as the augmented-reality gamer paradise of Daemon, and as another reviewer noted, the suspension of disbelief is more difficult with this story. However, the humor and lighter tone helped me to just go with it and enjoy the fun, silly ride.

Even though the beginning was slower paced, I found the scientific explanations of new technology and the psychological explorations of futuristic interrogation quite interesting.

Things really get fun when the action turns on. I loved the manipulated-gravity combat tactics that took Ender Game's "the enemy's gate is down" concept to entirely new levels.

While the story is about a secretive and ruthless government division suppressing miraculous breakthroughs in physics and technology, Suarez continues to acknowledge his gamer geek cred with a shout out to Leeroy Jenkins, and a nod to the greatest first-person-non-shooter (that would be Portal of course). One of the many enjoyable characters was a GladOS-like female AI that ran a secret facility and tried to kill people while cheerfully engaging them in friendly conversation. She even used laser-turrets for security.

The story ties up neatly, but there are rogue AIs left that could make for an interesting sequel (please).

As a big Suarez fan, I pre-ordered Influx and started listening within minutes of it being available after midnight. While it was different than his other books, I was definitely not disappointed and eagerly look forward to his next release.

Anesthesia

When a character has an unusual condition, in this case synesthesia, where the senses conflate, where sounds are felt as colors, for example, you really want such a powerful potential metaphor to figure into the story and character.

When you take the admirable path of building a science fiction story on a strong foundation of science fact, you have to make the science understandable to an audience that likely has a knowledge of science at a high school level, maybe some college.

When you create a double chase, where characters are being pursued by one group while pursuing the real bad guys, you have to follow the advice of the master, Alfred Hitchchock, and establish a McGuffin that is credible to the reader.

These are three big problems in Influx. Synesthesia explains how an relatively uneducated scientist can come up with technology that alters gravity, but his altered perspective hardly figures into the story otherwise, a major missed literary opportunity.

The physics behind his gravity-bending machine is so dense, and so densely front-loaded, that one cannot imagine making it past the first few chapters unless you have graduate level education in physics. Too bad, because the story gets better from that point on.

But as good as the story gets once the science is explained, the McGuffin that drives the plot simply makes no sense. Setting up a massive secret and deadly organization to hoard technology in pursuit of global domination makes no sense when you can easily achieve global domination by releasing that technology (it's like Dr. Evil's plan to extort One. Million. Dollars!). That pesky razor of Mr. Occam, derailing another far-fetched premise.

I saw a review of Influx that took the shape of a bell curve, the book getting increasingly better as the science is explained and worse as the science takes a back seat to the action. Different strokes for different folks. As much as I like science fact in my science fiction, Influx got worse as it delved deeper into the dense technology and progressively better as it fell back onto traditional action sequences.

Clever Premise....Wooden dialogue

I'm at a crossroads with Daniel Suarez. The comparisons to Michael Crichton are intriguing. But the one talent that Crichton excelled in comparison was dialogue. In INFLUX, you have an imaginative book with a clever premise that just falls short on the dialogue. Wooden exchanges, cliched comebacks, etc.. take quite a bit away from the story. In fact, i was torn whilst listening. chapter after chapter it was 'yuck' then 'more please' . It might have been the narrator contributing to this, but i found him to be quite tolerable. So in the end, i've come to the conclusion Suarez makes up with his imagination what he lacks in storytelling strength. Crichton was able to somewhat merge the two masterfully. Despite all shortcomings, I have become somewhat of a fan of Suarez in hopes that he can evolve.

Brilliant idea - - pretty good execution

The thing I really like about Daniel Suarez is it makes me feel like all the science classes actually stuck instead of simply drifting out of my head once I graduated. I have NO CLUE if even a speck of what he calls science is true, but I don't care - - I feel scientific just listening to him.

The good parts are that this book has a really smart premise, and the ability to make the far fetched seem plausible. The science part is brilliant. The plot is okay, again, simple but clever and executed well. The problem is that his characters are not what you would call multi-dimensional, truthfully they're rather stereotypical. But even with that the story does move along, but it isn't a page turner...it's a good yarn. And it's almost too easy to see the movie adaption of this one coming to a theater near you. Maybe I'm getting cynical, but if you've had the opportunity to read Daemon -- a great but complex book that I can't see ever being filmed -- this will seem much more straight forward almost as if to make it more easily adaptable (and yes, I hear the curmudgeon in my voice....). Even with the flaws, it's worth spending the credit if only to encourage the producers to get good actors to take on the roles.

Flawed Characters

Any additional comments?

Although Suarez touched on some interesting technological trends, I thought this book is more like Kill Decision than his first two great books. I found the main character deeply unlikable and the humble scientists who would introduce themselves as "the man who perfected..." I found completely unbelievable.

Non stop techno thriller

Would you consider the audio edition of Influx to be better than the print version?

Can't say.

What did you like best about this story?

The amazing technological discoveries fascinated me, but touching on the point of whether all technological advances are truly good for mankind gave it a bit more depth. Who should have the technology and who decides that is a subject we already face.

Have you listened to any of Jeff Gurner’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Jeff Gurner has performed all of the Daniel Suarez novels and has done a superb job in all them.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

In one spot, the protagonist suffers in a way that truly had me uncomfortable and squirming. I was sick for him and his situation. This isn't uncommon in a thriller, but this particular situation really affected me.

Any additional comments?

This book gives a rather unexpected turn of events early on and continues on a great pace from there. I don't want to give anything away, but this was a "page turner". Anytime I wasn't listening in the car, I had my bluetooth speaker out listening as I did chores. As this was the last of Suarez's books for me to listen to, I anxiously await more.

Superb!!

Daniel Suarez does it again. The story is well written and riveting. Couldn't put it down during the last 3 hours. For those who have read Daemon, this is just as good and engrossing.

Great stotyline

With todays current headlines, the NSA, Snowden,etc., I found myself constantly loosing track of what was real and what was part of the plot from the book.

ok kinda slow

I enjoyed the story BUT is was kinda hard to stay interested had some mediocre parts. overall not bad for background listining

Engaging

Great story, and the narrator is amazing. The only complaint would be that these books always seem to devolve into a big chase scene or battle at the end.