Review: Digital Fortress
I just finished reading the novel Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. With the recent release of the DaVinci Code, several of my co-workers have been re-reading Brown’s novels, and as I’d already read both The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, one of them loaned me a copy of his earlier novel. I must admit that I wasn’t terribly impressed for three reasons.
First, the entire premise of Digital Fortress is based around the NSA and the utilization of cryptography. As I have something of a background in that area, a lot of the techno-babble that was presented seemed either unnecessarily elementary, or in some cases outright wrong. I’m sure that 95% of the readership would probably not notice, and another 4% probably wouldn’t care, but if you know the difference between an encryption algorithm and encryption software or between a bit and a byte, or if you know much about the history of cryptography, you might be mildly irked (as I was) when some of the inaccuracies are presented.
Second, the climax of the encounter involved a puzzle that should not have taken the world’s greatest cryptanalysts nearly 30 minutes to solve. I’m not a total novice, but neither am I all that adept, and I had figured out the puzzle in under 2 minutes. For those who regularly deal with the most complicated and difficult codes in the world, such a simple puzzle should have been child’s play. By the same token, it was also frustrating when the “hyper secure” NSA facility only required a simple 5-character alphanumeric password for logins. Granted, the novel was written in 1998, but even as early as 1992, I knew that you wanted at least 8 characters including symbols and that you changed the password regularly.
Finally, I’m not sure whether it’s just me, but I seem to have no trouble determining the exact course of the plot in any of Brown’s novels. With Angels and Demons, I had picked out the villain within two paragraphs of his first appearance, and the climax of Digital Fortress seemed obvious nearly as early. Maybe it’s a weird gift (or curse?), but it’s sometimes frustrating when a book that is supposedly renowned for its plot twists seems blaringly obvious to me.
May 23rd, 2006 at 10:57 am
I’m french. As I read the Da Vinci Code of the same, I found so much obvious mystakes about french history, Paris’ description an so on, that I couldn’t take any pleasure reading it.
The core subject of the novel is an old one picked out of well known books of pseudo history. Each time, he used a new trick, I thought “Once more, he found the most common pseudo mysteries you read in railway stations”. He makes a mix with Rennes-le-Chateau, Templars, and Roslyn Chapel with a PC smell about Opus Dei. I think he couldn’t add one more.