Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

[zanfur]

Remember the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown? He also wrote a book called Digital Fortress, which is a thriller about crypto. Spoilers ahead, but it was a shitty book anyway, so don't read it.

It stank. I mean, the story was okay -- it was actually pretty good. But everything, and I mean damn near everything he said about crypto is

Comments

[the_agent]

I read "Angels & Demons" from Dan Brown. Terrible book about an anti-Catholic antimatter plot implemented by the Illuminati.

The thing is, I can't be arsed to research anything about stuff I write as fiction, so I can see where Brown may be coming from. I mean, from where I stand, writers are allowed to muck with anything they want to, though they should expect some flak from those who work or play in the fields they're portraying.

Technically, the writer's defense may be: if we don't say it's "real-life", we have no obligation to paint you a picture of today's technology, even if tomorrow's technology would have no better chance of solving mathematically impossible scenarios.

Thinking about it now...good Lord. If we truly knew what we wrote about, all we could write is what we already know, and the idea of fiction would be wasted. It's not for rehashing what we know, that's for textbook writers.

Not to say that by going "well, it's fiction" makes all trespasses go away, since there's a certain level of removal from "present-day"

[zanfur]

The thing that REALLY got my goat was that he thanked two anonymous NSA officials for giving him the information, and that the head of the NSA has a blurb about how it's so accurate, and if the public only knew they'd be so scared, blah blah blah. It was definitely portrayed as technically accurate. His website, incidentally, has a blurb claiming that his research is impeccable. He's definitely portraying his works as technically accurate

[the_agent]

There was an article that I read not too long ago about common mistakes when writing science fiction.

One had to do with having to redefine everything.

The remedy was simply stated. "Some things are going to last a while. If they're drinking coffee in your story, just call it coffee."

[the_agent]

You know, it'd be weird, but not implausible, if the government were instructing its own three-letter agents to endorse privately-authored books that scare the public.

Pretty low-budget, easy to staff, easy to separate from.

[spinemasher]

213=8192 not 4096=212

[zanfur]

Thankee. I'll update the post.

[flagmantho]

i haven't read any dan brown stuff (yet), but it's been recommended to me. however, when i read stuff by folks like dan brown and neal stephenson, i at least want a *modicum* of attention paid to reality.

like in the movie pi, when the (math genius) main character says that the kabbalic rabbis have probably tried every combination of possibilities for god's true name. every permutation of a 216 digit base-32 (or however many letters there are in the hebrew alphabet) number. and this guy is supposed to be a supergenius who can also do incredible feats of mental arithmetic. pshaw!

[zanfur]

Reading Neal Stephenson is like reading a history book -- but an interesting one, of course. His research really is impeccable, probably because he was a programmer before he was an author. As I was reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, I was eternally in awe of how he could explain extremely funky and technical concepts in ways that anyone can understand, and still be right.

The Dan Brown stuff is good, so long as you don't trust anything in it, and don't know about it in the first place. If you know about it in the first place, the good story is kinda ruined by the constant jarring of "that's wrong" going through your head.

Fictional Reality

[kierin723]

Seems like one of the main keys to good fiction is that the basis is consistent. Regardless whether you're speaking of magic, technology, or any other topic which may potentially be outside of the reader's realm of immediate familiarity, so long as the fundamental principles of the "reality" presented remain the same, it allows the possibility of suspended disbelief.

I do understand where you're coming from, though, as far as having additional knowledge from outside of the author's presentation of "fact." Like watching a movie, "nice effect, too bad it isn't possible." Then it's just a matter of considering what you were realistically trying to get out of it in the first place.

Then again, I do enjoy the occasional very "B" flick, so perhaps I shouldn't talk.

[cow]

I still need to read Da Vinci Code so that I can join in the group snark.

I plan on giving Digital Fortress a pass. Really, all I needed to know about it, I learned when gfish walked into the room, held up the book-on-CD, and said, "It's from the author of The Da Vinci Code, and get this: the NSA are the good guys, and the EFF are the bad guys!"

....yeah.

[zanfur]

Apparently they collected grams of antimatter. A whole 16grams, I believe, although I'm not sure of the number. They didn't describe what was done except to say that antimatter proved that God existed (that was the basis of motivation for most of the action in the book), and that it was only possible due to CERN's advanced (i.e. very large) particle accelerator. And there were windows into the accelerator tube, and everything. Oh, yeah, they collected the antimatter in vacuum in little tubes, suspended by a magnetic field, powered by a battery that had a lifetime of exactly 24 hours, complete with a little timer display thingy. Now, how they got the antimatter from the particla accelerator (which was not in vaccuum, seeing as the characters were walking around in it) into the little tubes, in a vacuum, is something they never bothered to specify.