Slashdot Mirror
Tetraktys
brothke writes "Imagine for a moment what his novels would read like if Dan Brown got his facts correct. The challenge Brown and similar authors face is to write a novel that is both compelling and faithful to the facts. In Tetraktys, author Ari Juels is able to weave an interesting and readable story, and stay faithful to the facts. While Brown seemingly lacks the scientific and academic background needed to write such fiction, Juels has a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley and is currently the Chief Scientist and director at RSA Laboratories, the research division of RSA Security." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
Tetraktys
author
Ari Juels
pages
351
publisher
Emerald Bay Books
rating
Excellent debut novel by Ari Juels
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-0982283707
summary
Intriguing cryptographic thriller
The book, which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller, tells the story of Ambrose Jerusalem, a gifted computer security expert, still haunted by his father's death, a few months shy of his doctorate, who has a beautiful and loving girlfriend, and a bright future ahead of him. This is until the government gets involved and Jerusalem's plans are put on hold when the NSA asks him to join them to track down a strange and disturbing series of computer breaches.
Tetraktys, like similar thrillers, has its standard set of characters; from corrupt State Department and World Bank officials, a dashing protagonist with a long-suffering girlfriend, to mysterious and obscure terrorist groups. This terrorist group is in the book is comprised of followers of Pythagoras.
As to the title, a tetraktys is a triangular figure of ten points arranged in four rows, with one, two, three, and four points in each row. It is a mystical symbol and was most important to the followers of Pythagoras. While mainly known as the creator of the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagoras of Samos was an influential Greek mathematician and founder of the religious movement of Pythagoreanism. Those wanting more information can watch a video about the symbol.
As to the storyline, the NSA is trying to recruit Ambrose as they feel that the terrorists, who form a secret cult of followers of Pythagoras have broken the RSA public-key algorithm. Breaking RSA is something that is not expected for many decades, but if a revolution in factoring numbers were to occur sooner, RSA's demise could happen that much quicker. And if RSA was indeed broken by the antagonists, it would undermine the security of nearly every government and financial institution worldwide and create utter anarchy.
A good part of the book centers on the cult of Pythagoras. Its followers believe that truth and reality can only be understood via their system of numbers. The NSA needs Jerusalem's assistance as he is one of the few people who have the mathematical, classical and philosophical background to help them. It is he who ultimately connects the dots that the Pythagoreans have left, which leads to the books dramatic conclusion.
The book is a most enjoyable read and one is hard pressed to put it down once they start reading it. The reader gets a good understanding of who Pythagoras was and his worldview via Juels weaving of Pythagorean philosophy into the storyline.
While the book is not autobiographical, there are many similarities between Ambrose Jerusalem and Ari Juels. From identical initials, to their lives in events in Berkeley and Cambridge, to RSA and more.
For a first book of fiction, Tetraktys is a great read. As a novelist, Juels style approaches that of Umberto Eco, in that he weaves numerous areas of thought into an integrated story. Like Eco's works, Tetraktys has an arcane historical figure as part of it storyline, and an intricate plot that takes the reader on many, and some unexpected, turns. While not as complex and difficult to read as Eco, Tetraktys is a remarkable work of fiction for someone with a doctorate in computer science, not literature.
The book though does have some gaps, but that could be expected for a first novel. The reader is never sure what the Pythagoreans are really after or why they have resurfaced, and one of the characters is killed, for reasons that are not apparent. Readers who want more information can visit the Tetraktys web site.
As to the book's protagonist, Ambrose Jerusalem is to Juels what Jack Ryan is to Tom Clancy, meaning that his adventures are just beginning, and that is a good thing.
For those interested in a cryptographic thriller, Tetraktys is an enjoyable read. The book interlaces Greek philosophy, mathematics, and modern crime into a cogent theme that is a compelling read. And if the exploits of Ambrose Jerusalem continue, we may have found the successor to Umberto Eco.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Tetraktys from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Tetraktys, like similar thrillers, has its standard set of characters; from corrupt State Department and World Bank officials, a dashing protagonist with a long-suffering girlfriend, to mysterious and obscure terrorist groups. This terrorist group is in the book is comprised of followers of Pythagoras.
As to the title, a tetraktys is a triangular figure of ten points arranged in four rows, with one, two, three, and four points in each row. It is a mystical symbol and was most important to the followers of Pythagoras. While mainly known as the creator of the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagoras of Samos was an influential Greek mathematician and founder of the religious movement of Pythagoreanism. Those wanting more information can watch a video about the symbol.
As to the storyline, the NSA is trying to recruit Ambrose as they feel that the terrorists, who form a secret cult of followers of Pythagoras have broken the RSA public-key algorithm. Breaking RSA is something that is not expected for many decades, but if a revolution in factoring numbers were to occur sooner, RSA's demise could happen that much quicker. And if RSA was indeed broken by the antagonists, it would undermine the security of nearly every government and financial institution worldwide and create utter anarchy.
A good part of the book centers on the cult of Pythagoras. Its followers believe that truth and reality can only be understood via their system of numbers. The NSA needs Jerusalem's assistance as he is one of the few people who have the mathematical, classical and philosophical background to help them. It is he who ultimately connects the dots that the Pythagoreans have left, which leads to the books dramatic conclusion.
The book is a most enjoyable read and one is hard pressed to put it down once they start reading it. The reader gets a good understanding of who Pythagoras was and his worldview via Juels weaving of Pythagorean philosophy into the storyline.
While the book is not autobiographical, there are many similarities between Ambrose Jerusalem and Ari Juels. From identical initials, to their lives in events in Berkeley and Cambridge, to RSA and more.
For a first book of fiction, Tetraktys is a great read. As a novelist, Juels style approaches that of Umberto Eco, in that he weaves numerous areas of thought into an integrated story. Like Eco's works, Tetraktys has an arcane historical figure as part of it storyline, and an intricate plot that takes the reader on many, and some unexpected, turns. While not as complex and difficult to read as Eco, Tetraktys is a remarkable work of fiction for someone with a doctorate in computer science, not literature.
The book though does have some gaps, but that could be expected for a first novel. The reader is never sure what the Pythagoreans are really after or why they have resurfaced, and one of the characters is killed, for reasons that are not apparent. Readers who want more information can visit the Tetraktys web site.
As to the book's protagonist, Ambrose Jerusalem is to Juels what Jack Ryan is to Tom Clancy, meaning that his adventures are just beginning, and that is a good thing.
For those interested in a cryptographic thriller, Tetraktys is an enjoyable read. The book interlaces Greek philosophy, mathematics, and modern crime into a cogent theme that is a compelling read. And if the exploits of Ambrose Jerusalem continue, we may have found the successor to Umberto Eco.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Tetraktys from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Yeah right!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
While Brown seemingly lacks the scientific and academic background needed to write such fiction, Juels has a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley
Does Computer Science really qualify as "science"? It seems much more like mathematics to me.
One place where CS might be considered a science is in the empirical characterization of software/computer systems. But even there, the nearly complete lack of statistical rigor shown in C.S. papers suggests a big difference between computer scientists and, for example, physicists.
which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller
Toast by Charles Stross would be a counterexample to this ludicrous claim.
"The book, which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller"
Perhaps the reviewer has never heard of Cryptonomicon....
For believing these claims. WRONG!
Isn't "cryptographic thriller" an oxymoron?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's like asking me to imagine what an Agatha Christie novel would read like if no one committed a crime.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
While Brown seemingly lacks the scientific and academic background needed to write such fiction
Now, now, let's not leave out literary background from that list.
sic transit gloria mundi
brothke starts a sentence,
The book, which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller[...].
which of course isn't true. E.g., Cryptonomicon.
I'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank. Maybe the reason he writes his books lacking technical authenticity is at least in part because that's what people want to read?
Imagine for a moment what his novels would read like if Dan Brown got his facts correct... The book, which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller
Imagine if the reviewer did some research before posting here. Bah! Why bother with even a simple search to see if there are any previous works which might be construed as fiction involving cryptography. You would think that Ben would at least recall Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. If that does not fit ones definition, there's a list suggested by Wikipedia.
Cryptonomicon
What has the world come to when we can't rely on our works of fiction for our facts! Oh, Discordia!
Dan Brown is relevant to this review... how?
Imagine if Stephen King got his facts right about supernatural entities.... Sheesh. There's a reason it's called fiction. The non-fiction section is on the other side of the book store.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you are going to weave history into your fiction or (even worse) if you are writing historical fiction, the actual facts you use should be checked and correct. There are rules to the game. Just as you cannot conjure up a ray gun in a work of fantasy or cast a spell in a hard SF novel (unless you're trying for some cross-genre thing) and not get laughed out of a publishing house, you aren't supposed to play particularly fast and loose on historical facts in a work that is supposedly historically based.
That is all.
what sort of novel for geeks in 2009 does not have a Kindle edition? This one, i guess... bummer - i was going to buy it - now i'll forget. /i
Many of you saw The Matrix, despite the people behind it lacking a degree in Artificial Intelligence. You all went and saw Transformers, and (might) have enjoyed it. And let's not get started on how many movies are gutted at Bad Astronomy... And yet, despite this, we watch them anyway and enjoy them, despite the technical inconsistencies and writers lacking in super-special-awesome credentials of doom. Odds are, if you're reading this, you don't have those credentials either.
P.S. Totally posted this from the console of a Gibson. :P
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Brown freely admits that his books are not based entirely in fact. It's called creative license - the facts that Brown has written about weren't quite interesting enough to make his book a bestseller, so rather than that he modifies them a little bit for public consumption.
Cryptonomicon doesn't count as a cryptographic thriller? Perhaps I misunderstood the term. (Not that I'm claiming it's the first, just that it's the first thing that came to mind when I read "cryptographic thriller".)
Dan Brown claims 99% correctness with the Da Vinci Code. I'm sure no one would care if he hadn't made that and similar claims.
Tolkien did get the fact rights.
Which wasn't too hard as he invented those facts in the first place, but whatever.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This terrorist group is in the book is comprised of followers of Pythagoras.
Did Yoda write this review??
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
His novels would still read as though written by a cheap hack, whose best friend is cliché.
Since when does any work of fiction have to have the "facts" straight? A good story is a good story and what the "facts" are is entirely irrelevant. You might as well say, "Jules Verne's From The Earth To The Moon would be more interesting if he got his facts straight." Sheesh! go buy an imagination.
Proverbs 21:19
And while Juels is a Chief Scientist and director at RSA Labs, Dan Brown is a multimillionaire and is currently hanging out in his pool at his palatial mansion and dating smoking hot models and actresses.
So much for writing *accurate* fiction...
Making up what is necessary to tell the story is very different from making everything up. The first is, pretty much, what all fiction writers do; the second is pure laziness.
Tolkien's an interesting example. How do you come up with a believable fantasy world? Well, for one thing, you create a history for it. The history you create has echoes of real history and/or well-known mythology, so it feels right to the reader. You populate your world with people who are products of that history, who live in a self-consistent world and react to their surroundings in believable ways. If you're really dedicated, maybe you even come up with meaningful, believable languages for them to speak. All of which, of course, Tolkien did -- and most fantasy authors don't, which is why poorly thought out sword-and-sorcery epics come and go all the time, while Tolkien's work endures.
In the case of fiction set in the more-or-less real world, it's both easier and harder. Easier, because most of the worldbuilding is already done for you; harder, because if you make a mistake, there are going to be a hell of a lot of people who know exactly where you went wrong. If you give a damn about your own work, you'll try to do the latter as little as possible, and put just as much effort into your background research as you do into characterization and plot. There are plenty of authors who just don't care, of course, and plenty of readers who don't either; that's their choice, but those of us who do care reserve the right to point and laugh.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The Da Vinci Code was fiction. Exactly what facts should the author of a work of fiction get straight?
If the morons that read that particular book took it for truth that's their problem not the author's.
If the author is smart enough to write about 'a gifted computer security expert', why does the video of the tektrakys require a plugin from Microsoft?
Maybe he meant gramatically.
THL phish sticks
I don't believe authors ought to be involved in what's called "world building". :)
Sounds like NUMB3RS for the big screen.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Could you put the "Book Review" part of the title in the RSS feed? I personally don't find any of the book entries useful and I'd rather avoid them instead of clicking thinking I'm gonna read something that excites me... Not that books don't excite me. The ones listed here, however, do nothing for me. Not even after 10 beers.
Even if Dan Brown were a scrupulous fact-checker, merely weaving in plot points to his collection of "facts", his books would still be complete and utter crap. I tried to get through one and couldn't make it past twenty pages. It was downright painful to read. The dialogue was horrible and the background text even worse.
SirWired
And your belief is why we end up with many books that are basically the same formula. Authors should be able to do whatever they want to. If they do it well, their books will sell (in an ideal world).
The first edition of Robert Harris' Enigma came out in 1995.
On my Slashdot??
___
* Religious topics are a subset of fantasy.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Speaking of "getting your facts right" ...
Breaking RSA is something that is not expected for many decades
Um, [citation needed] much? Seriously does anyone expect RSA to be broken in the next few decades?
Certainly much longer key lengths will be brute-forceable in the next few decades, but that's a far cry from coming up with a polynomial time algorithm that breaks RSA.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
Sci-fi written by a JPL scientist, well-written, with compelling stories and characters... and knowing that all of it, however fantastic it sounded (e.g. life on a neutron star), was completely plausible...
I've never heard of him nor the book before, but since he's obviously a deeply fascinating and varied guy who writes self-promoting books about the company he works for, I'll give it a shot too.
Apparently you've never read Dan Brown.
thank you. yours is the most best reply on this thread.
Digital Fortress is as real as the sequels to The Matrix and the prequels to Star Wars. It has never existed and never will. For your own safety, shut up now.
He doesn't just make little mistakes. He makes such amazingly wrong claims that they are worth reading by themselves. And it doesn't matter what the subject is. He can screw up math, religion science or philosophy. The most directly relevant work for for this thread is Brown's Digital Fortress. My favorite part of that is the part where he clearly doesn't understand public key cryptography. He thinks that one needs to exchange a secret key to use public key cryptography. Of course, the whole point is that you don't need to do that. I'm not quite sure if Dan just didn't do the research http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidNotDoTheResearch or is so pigheaded that after reading about public key crypto it didn't fit in with his intuition about how crypto should behave and so he just completely misremembered it. And that's only one of the many serious problems with Brown's works.
Well, definitely sounds interesting but there's nowhere to buy this thing it seems. Amazon's stock is depleted and I can't find it anywhere else...
There are people who can present interesting technical or philosophical discussions in fiction and do it well; there are far more who can do it really badly, and some of them can get editors to publish their work for them :-) IMHO, "better novel writer than Dan Brown" is a fairly low bar to jump, as is (to pick a much more important writer in a different technical field) "better novel writer than Ayn Rand"... I haven't read Tetrakys, so I'm not going to judge its literary merits.
Cryptonomicon is probably the canonical novel in the field - Neal got away with enough rambling that he was allowed to write a far longer Baroque trilogy after that, but so much of the fun with Cryptonomicon was that back when it came out, we _knew_ most of the characters (and even if you didn't recognize the specific individuals, most people in the tech startup world at least knew them as archetypes, and the getting-venture-funding and literary-critic-girlfriend bits were dead on as well as totally over the top.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I read Digital Fortress and I think it was his first novel, I thought it was ok at best, pretty amateur... Why are they calling Dan Brown out on this? This guy writes fiction. Without getting into a religious debate with every Googler and Wikipedia addict on the net, there was a time when people read books and contrary to popular belief not every fact or theory is on the net. The problem with Mr, Brown is that he really irked Christians and Catholics alike. How can you call Jesus a regular man? And that he had feelings like other men? How dare he...lol
Why? There are authors who are VERY careful to make their historical fiction as accurate as possible. Patrick O'Brian was famous for that. When he was writing about the Napoleonic Royal Navy he spent most of his time poring over old ships logs.
Other's don't. They want to tell a story. They're writing fiction, not historical fiction. So long as they don't claim to be writing historical fiction they can do whatever they want.
Are you suggesting that anything but rigorous historical fiction should just lack any backstory at all? Or should the backstory just be entirely made up and bear so little relationship to reality that it's obviously fiction even to the dumbest person who is actually literate enough to read the book?
You got caught believing The DaVinci code was real, didn't you?
You would think a book written by a computer guy would be available in a modern format...
Dan Brown claims 99% correctness with the Da Vinci Code. I'm sure no one would care if he hadn't made that and similar claims.
Yes, but he also claimed the other 47% was just made up.
And now the moderators wonder: +1 Funny...or +1 Informative?
Life is short; think quickly.
I mean, it's a non-authoritative source and everything. Totally unreliable. Useless.
Breakfast served all day!
Compare this book with the work of Umberto Eco, post-modernist literature? You got to be kidding, right?
Isn't that the one with Sandra Bullock? ?:\
Tried to buy it for my Kindle and couldn't. :(
Would love to get my hands on the book, but Amazon is out and the general printing isn't until September.