Believe me, if you're a geek, you wouldn't want to be reading this book. Having read Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and now Digital Fortress, I simply can't understand why Dan Brown became so famous.Da Vinci Code is a wonderful book - I'll give him that. The prose is not the best, but he's a good storyteller, even though it is not really his story per se. All the conspiracy theories in the book about Leonardo da Vinci, Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail, the Priory of Sion, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, etc. have been tackled before. Dan Brown was the one who collated them and spun a thrilling tale out of them.
With Digital Fortress, he's obviously out of his element. Knowing a little bit of NSA and public-key encryption and Enigma and Skipjack and hardware keyloggers and mutation strings does not a crypto expert make. The storyline is very basic - everything else is fluff. I don't mind fluff, but there's just too many inaccuracies and plot holes in this one. NSA is not the ultra-top-secret government agency like MIB that Mr. Brown makes it to be. Nobody names their supercomputer TRANSLATR. What next, a sysad called z3r0c00l? The idea of a supercomputer that can break any code in a matter of minutes is flawed. At the very least, you'll have to know the algorithm used. And how did Node 3 become the nerve center of Crypto? All hell breaks loose, and nobody on the outside knows about it? How did those firearms get into Node 3? No surveillance cameras? No security checks? And a supercomputer that blows up because of a cooling system malfunction? Even the lowly PC knows enough to shut itself down in such a case.
I have a complaint about Mr. Brown's writing style, too. The guy is not writing a book, he's writing a movie transcript. Imagine 128 chapter in 429 pages (paperback). He's got three or four simultaneous plot threads, and every few pages he would make a switch. Tolerable at first, but I tell you, it gets tiring very fast. Cardboard characters, cheesy dialogue, convoluted plot twists. The last scene where everyone is trying to guess the passphrase to deactivate the worm takes the cake. Somehow this worm is uber-smart that it can take down the multiple levels of firewall/antivirus/anti-spyware/anti-adware software protecting the NSA databank. As the script kiddies and crackers burrow deeper into the database, the cream of the NSA crap, I mean crop run around shrieking and waving their hands in the air, "10...9...8..." Listen guys, just disable the port, all right? Or get a pair of cable cutters and cut off (literally) all external links, ok? Jeez. As for the "prime difference" clue, I immediately got the hint. No points for the "brilliant and beautiful mathematician" Susan Fletcher with an IQ of 170.
Just to be cute, Mr. Brown included a code at the end of the book. I didn't even try to solve it because I'm sure it's a pathetic newbie attempt at cryptography. I still have Deception Point on my bookshelf. I think it's another filler Dan Brown cranked out so that bookstores can sell those collector's edition foursome in a special box. I'll probably read it when I'm feeling down - to get a few laughs.
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