Oh, for a conveniently placed mirror.

[bouteillebleu]

One of the things that puts me off in fiction is when the writer drops everything to describe what their main character looks like. Now, I understand that it's difficult to make it through an entire novel without giving any hint of what the character looks like, so I can understand mentioning what they're wearing (because they might be dressed

Comments

[cartesiandaemon]

It would work quite well if the point was to define the guard's character. *sigh* I understand the temptation: you imagine a character, so you imagine what they *look* like, and describe that. I've done it. But often the best don't do anything; if you don't know what they look like, they look like *you*.

[bouteillebleu]

It would work quite well if the point was to define the guard's character.

The ironic thing is that there's at least one character (introduced later) if not two who would notice these sorts of things, and the way they noticed it would tell us more about them than "oh, I think she's so damn hot".

The book itself pretty much merits "mediocre", and I remain flabbergasted at the fact that people hired by the NSA - crypotgraphers and programmers, apparently "the best of the best" - have had such a poor education that they don't know anything about chemistry. (It's important later. Sadly enough.)

[cartesiandaemon]

It's a book? I thought it was going to be fanfiction! OK, not really, I've read a lot worse in published books, this is by no means a killer.

(What book was it?)

Well, I don't know anything about chemistry :) Though I guess my 'nothing' is a lot higher than some people's. I'm more appalled when someone's that ignorant of their supposed speciality (*cough* dan brown *cough* :) )

(Note: spoiler for Digital Fortress in this comment.)

[bouteillebleu]

The book was Digital Fortress, by - you guessed it, albeit inadvertantly - Dan Brown.

And he's pretty bad at the cryptography as well:

"Encryption algorithms were just mathematical formulas, recipes for scrambling text into code. Mathematicians and programmers created new algorithms every day. There were hundreds of them on the market - PGP, Diffie-Hellman, ZIP, IDEA, El Gamal. TRANSLTR [the supercomputer the NSA use] broke all of their codes every day, no problem. To TRANSLTR all codes looked identical, regardless of which algorithm wrote them."

Perhaps if he'd known that cracking things like PGP/DES/RSA mainly involves factoring huge numbers into their composite primes, then he wouldn't have written such nonsense... Then again, he'd have to explain to the audience what prime numbers are.

[reichsfreiherr]

Was the book by a male author perchance? She sounds like some bad-fic author’s wet dream. Though for some reason the name of the character sounds familiar so I suspect that it’s from something actually published.
I can only wish it was the “Atlanta Nights” thing, yet somehow I’m sure it’s not...

[bouteillebleu]

No, Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts (and I'm picking up my printed copy of it today, hooray!). This was a mediocre book (Digital Fortress) written by a writer who's got a reasonable grasp of writing twists and vaguely thriller-like things (though there were only a few scenes I thought were well-written), but hasn't figured out characterisation or decent research (Dan Brown).

I picked it up because the main character was a "brilliant, beautiful mathematician" (oh really?), and Oxfam didn't have the Da Vinci Code in so I couldn't point and laugh at that.

[reichsfreiherr]

Ah, yes the requisite that she must be beautiful as well as everything else because no female genius must be average looking or god forbid, not necessarily all that attractive at all.
Is it just me or is 170 not that high an IQ anyway? I know its Mensa level or at least there abouts but seeing as those are all standardised tests anyway I’m not sure I put much stock in it really.

I can’t remember the last fiction novel I read for fun; I suppose it might have been Nigel Williams’ “The Wimbledon Poisoner” or Zoë Heller’s “Notes on a Scandal” which for all that it’s marketed as almost ‘chick lit’ is actually rather good.

[bouteillebleu]

Is it just me or is 170 not that high an IQ anyway?

Well,
at about fifteen I did an online IQ test that put me around 165, so while it's high for the population in general it's going to be around average for a group of highly intelligent mathematicians - perhaps even below average, certainly if the person in question is supposed to be one of the best in her field.

And I didn't mind the beauty part (I ignored it, really), but the gasping at every surprise and being shocked and surprised at things such an experienced cryptographer should have taken in stride... those annoyed me. Claiming she's beautiful is fine (all it affects is how others in the story see her). Claiming she's brilliant and then portraying her as someone who can barely come up with an original thought is not fine