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Digital Fortress
The premise
The first page ("Prologue") is enough to draw you right in. A Japanese man in Seville, Spain, is dying, and in his last act he attempts to communicate with fellow tourists. We immediately wonder, What is he trying to say? How does this relate to the premise of the book?
Flipping the page literally flips across the Atlantic Ocean, to the National Security Agency (NSA) and to beautiful, intelligent Susan Fletcher, head cryptographer at the NSA. She is involved with a university language professor named David Becker--a man who will figure deeply into the story.
A mysterious phone call sends David to Spain and a phone call from Susan's boss, Commander Strathmore, brings her to NSA headquarters. It's there that she learns of a potentially fatal threat to the NSA's codebreaking supercomputer, TRANSLTR--an unbreakable encryption. Strathmore briefs her that a disgruntled former employee, Ensei Tankado, has threatened to release this encryption scheme to the highest bidder. If Tankado does so, the NSA will be crippled--a fact proven by the revelation that TRANSLTR normally spends minutes decoding a message, but has spent more than half a day trying to break Tankado's algorithm.
Tankado isn't stupid--Strathmore says he has an accomplice who will release the code in the event that something happens to Tankado. Unfortunately, Tankado is the Japanese man who has died in Seville...and thus the NSA is running out of time to locate Tankado's pass key to break the encryption before his accomplice can release it to the world.
Meanwhile, Becker is still in Spain, under orders--from Strathmore, it turns out--to do just that. He realizes that Tankado's ring is the "key" to the mystery, and thus he begins a frantic search that leads him from a French-Canadian writer in the clinic, to a fat German tourist and his red-haired "escort," to a punk rock bar on the outskirts of town. Did I mention he's being followed by a deaf assassin the whole time?
What I likedAs I mentioned, Digital Fortress has all the elements that I was looking for. It had just the right amount of main characters, and everyone had a proper place in the book and in the story. I'm appreciative of the tidbits of technical information here and there--mentions of PGP, NSA history, and other such morsels were well placed.
There was also a smattering of sexual energy (although no real "sex scenes") and humor here and there. Who said computer geeks can't have a good time?!
I'm also a fan of subplots in books, that magically mesh together near the climax. Dan Brown deserves praise in this regard: minor characters who initially make you question their presence are brought nicely into the fold and given purpose.
In any book like this, little puzzles and questions come up as a matter of course. The reader is challenged to solve them just as the characters are. In this book, there are many such puzzles: What does the inscription on the ring mean? Who is Tankado working with, and how? What is the pass-code for the encryption scheme? Why is David Becker being hunted down? I delighted in trying to come up with answers to these questions as I read the book, and was pleasantly surprised to see I was wrong in many respects.
What I didn't likeIn any mystery or thriller, the idea is to keep the reader guessing as long as possible, through plot twists, diverging plot lines that reconnect later, and the like. Brown does a fairly good job here, but this is where the book has its weakest points. For example, it is revealed early on that Tankado and the dead Japanese man in Spain are the same person. While this is perhaps unavoidable to push the plot along, I found it strange to have this happen so quickly. Later in the book, the author flips back and forth between who could be Tankado's accomplice, and who has committed a murder in Crypto. This flip-flopping is done poorly and leaves the reader thinking, "I already have my mind made up and you're not doing very well dangling red herrings." I had the bad guy pegged a couple of chapters before it was revealed, although I will admit that I was surprised at a particular turn of events afterwards.
Although this book was published in the late '90s, the technology aspects are still relevant--but this book gets some technical facts incorrect, or at least a bit off. However, they're fairly minor and don't detract from the book too much.
Some plot points are just too far fetched to be believable. For example, Susan's fiance, David Becker, tries to outrun a taxi--driven by the deaf assassin--while on a motorbike. The professional assassin fires several shots at Becker and misses every time, even though the bike is significantly slower than the taxi and the shots hit the bike body itself on several occasions.
Finally, some of the people in the NSA seem too stupid to be working there. In an effort to not give away spoilers, I can't be too much more specific than that, but suffice it to say that the "solution" is something that a high school science student wouldn't have much trouble figuring out.
Final thoughtsI tore into this book with high expectations. I finished the book with mixed feelings. As I look back on it, I can't help but feel that there was a lot of untapped potential and some glaring mistakes that could have been avoided. But I'm also pleased to have read what I consider a fairly good book, one that has served to heighten my interest in the genre, and made me even more ready to read The DaVinci Code.
Of course, it wouldn't be fair to compare this book to any of Dan Brown's later works. An author matures as he or she writes more books, and thus I'm certain that many of my quibbles would have been ironed out in future books. I'll have to find that out when I read DaVinci.
While it might seem that I had more bad to say about the book than good, I'd say that the reverse is actually true--the "good" goes all through the book, but there isn't really a way to quantify it.
I'd wholeheartedly recommend this novel to anyone who has an interest in technological thrillers, spy novels, or thrillers in general. It's a very accessible and enjoyable read, and I'm glad I bought it.
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Isn't the entire book based on something impossible?
Anything in parenthesis may (not) be ignored.
As I look back on it, I can't help but feel that there was a lot of untapped potential and some glaring mistakes that could have been avoided.
This is a good summation of how I felt about DaVinci Code. Great premise, middling implementation.
I read it last month. I keep most of the books I read when I'm done. I threw this one out. It wasn't a bad read, but I agree with the reviewer that in the end it just wasn't satisfying.
One concept the book deals with that I thought was good was the belief by many intelligence pros that they need to "protect" the citizens from things that cannot be spoken. Hogwash. I'm sure the NSA does valuable work but when they start to trample the Constitution it's time to say ENOUGH. The fouders of the U.S. thought the people should always distrust the government and retain the means to change it if and when it became opressive or tyrannical. If the government accrues too much power to control information and the ability to track what every single person does and says and buys every moment of every waking day then it becomes impossible for the people to exercise that power. It is truly Big Brother-esque.
The book did a good job of exploring both sides of that debate. The guy who wrote the Digital Fortress algorithm was someone who didn't believe that governments should have the right to spy on its own citizens without at least telling them that it was doing so. Central to the plot was an extortion scheme in which the perpetrator, Tankada, wanted only one thing: For the gogernment to come out and publicly admit that it could, in fact, decrypt and read everything that was being sent via encrypted email.
The book still sucked.
I have to say that the errors in DF are not much of a surprise, given the serious errors in TDVC - in which the author pretty much cribs some far-fetched theories from 20+ year old books, reports them as fact, and ... profits! The reason people here on /. are surprised about errors in digital fortress is that they don't have the background to see the errors in TDVC - and probably the same is true vice versa for religious scholars who didn't see any error in Digital Fortress...
Did anyone else get the correct number long before the fictional protagonists did...and wonder why, if these people were so smart, they didn't know the difference between the two bombs? I mean, all the NSA people I know are uber-trivia nerds and would've nailed that number in ten seconds, tops. It made an otherwise interesting book hopelessly simplistic imnsho.
Regards,
Brian
I recommend the James Bond books. Sure, they are dated, but the provide an interesting glimpse into spycraft as it was 50 years ago.
;)
Some notes of interest:
-the books have almost nothing to do with the movies
-the books are short, about 150 pages
-not much action in the books
-Bond is not bulletproof like his movie counterpart
I get the feeling as reading these books that Ian Fleming writes about what he knows, and the material seems well reasearched, whether it be about rocket engines or toxic flora.
Anywho, just thought I'd toss in my $2E-2 while we're talking about what we're reading
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Digital Fortress suffered from, as others noted, "idiot plots" in which the main characters have to think and act like idiots in order to propel the book along in order to create suspense. I find idiot plots highly annoying, because anyone with the purported intelligence of the main characters does the *stupidest* things or misses the *blatantly obvious* solutions to the problem. And I don't exactly consider myself genius material; we're talking on the order of "not interviewing primary witnesses to an event" level of stupidity.
Also, Brown now has three books that use time constraints to provide the major tension in the plot. The characters have only nnnn amount of time to figure things out or something truly bad will happen. (nnnn is usually an arbitrarily small number, like 24 hours.) Since the characters are acting like idiots, the time constraints only allow Brown to pull quickie and highly improbable solutions out of a hat -- "My god! You mean the Pope was really a female impersonator?" This isn't innovative, it's trite.
As cheapie reads from a used bookstore, Brown's books could be worse, but they're not worth paying full price at a bookstore. They're not high art or truly innovative, and I really don't understand why "DaVinci Code" has been on the bestseller list for so long.
(Slightly off topic: I think the Templar sigils in "Angels and Demons" are truly creative -- and they were created by an artist friend of Brown's. Best thing about the book.)
I started to read Angels and Demons and found it laughable in it's giving away of things early and the actions of the hero. After the third, "He didn't know he'd use this knowledge several hours later" I gave up and canceled my hold on The daVince Code.
-jls
Techno-pagan
I am constantly disappointed by how many people choose to read this kind of crap. I read DVC with my book club, and it was just plain bad. I don't even really have a problem with a nice, mindless read from time to time, but 400 pages of it? Dear god. And people go out of their way to read more than one of his books?
If you've already read through all of the classics in Western literature, then by all means, read something by Dan Brown. I'm warning you now, you'll feel like you've wasted a few hours when you finish. But if the last ten books you read were featured prominently in airport book stores, and you've never read anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or John Steinbeck, or John Updike, or Cormac McCarthy, or Jane Austen, or Flannery O'Connor, or Jorge Luis Borges, then do yourself a favor and skip Dan Brown's crap.
(Yeah, somebody here is going to tell me that all of the authors that I mentioned suck. Fine. But can you honestly say they suck more than Dan Brown? Or most of the other stuff on the best seller lists these days?)
andy
Life is life . . . everything else is just a stupid T-shirt slogan.
That's the only way I could describe the novel. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, in about five hours time, finishing at about 2AM. I couldn't put it down.
I have a habit of reading books several times over, but I could not get through this book the second time. Once I was over the suspense and action I found that almost half the book was stupid, implausible, fictional, inaccurate, unbelieveable, and contrary to all logic. Example: A Google search for "Rotating Cleartext" (which was one of the major parts of the supposedly unbreakable encryption) turned up exactly two results; both of them were about the book itself.
The major failure, though, was the idea that a supercomputer--even a really really fast one--could crack an unknown algorithm by brute force. The idea of applying key guessing to a unknown encryption type is rediculous and impossible.
If you tried it for a long enough time you could probably decode it into an entirely different message, for the same reason monkeys could produce the full works of Shakespeare. And then if you know the algorithm, key guessing by definition will always work, although it may take centuries (not hours, as the book claims). There are more technical inaccuracies that I noticed and that others noticed (especially the final firewall scene). That said, the book was a fun read for a couple of hours, and I might have some fun later illustrating exactly where the book got it wrong (Answer: A lot of places).
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Dan Brown has that wonderful knack that some authors have of making one feel like an "insider" or privy to information that "outsiders" don't have. With "Da Vinci Code" we were part of the secrets of the Louvre, many ancient bits of occult religious lore, and that most intriguing of all Catholic institutions Opus Dei. In "Angels and Demons" (my preferred book of the three) we're in on the hidden treasures of the Vatican library and the Illuminati--source of centuries of speculation. With "Digital Fortress" he takes us inside the NSA.
He also entertains us by piling thrill upon thrill, twist upon turn, surprise upon surprise. I thought he did the best job of this with "Angels and Demons," which I felt I had to put down occasionally just to catch my breath. I wasn't as captivated by "Da Vinci" because I was already familiar with the central suprise of the book, and it didn't shock me. With "Digital Fortress," I guessed the meaning of the pivotal code pages before any of the supposed cryptography geniuses, scientists, and other NSA gurus did. Since I don't regard myself as all that brilliant, my guess is that any educated reader would do the same.
Still, I'll always follow an author who gives me that "inside track" feeling. Clancy was that way in several of his earlier novels, and I'll probably pick up anything new that Dan Brown has to offer.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
I totally agree - after reading DaVinci Code and Digital Fortress, I can pretty much sum up Dan Brown's formula as the following:
:(
- Start off with an interesting hook and quickly diverge into two (or more) concurrent plots. Minimal character development is necessary.
- Devote alternating chapters to each plot
- End each (short) chapter with a 'cliffhanger' style situation. This gives the 'page-turner' feel because there's always some unresolved situation that haunts you during reading.
- Don't worry about factual accuracy. Better yet, ignore accuracy altogether if it hampers the plot.
- Make the two concurrent plots collide during the last chapter or two of the book and tidy up the situation entirely too neatly.
It's not that either of the books is a bad read - I've read much worse... it's just the formulaic predictability that makes me want to stay away from anything else he might churn out
I've never found plots about magical code-breaking machines that can crack any code (by magic apparently, and repeal of mathematics) to be very plausible. It's as if people believe that the NSA trumps reality.