Author: Dan Brown
From a story perspective, this was actually very good. The plot moves very fast, it’s exciting, there are nice twists and turns, and while it’s somewhat predictable in places, in general the author does a good job. The quality of the words themselves is mediocre to poor. But the biggest sin is that the book is technically flawed. The story’s supposed to be about codes and code-breaking. A rebel hacker has created an “unbreakable” code and is blackmailing the NSA with it. This interested me a great deal, but it’s painfully obvious the author is neither a code expert and knows nothing about technology. Horribly amateurish mistakes are rampant. For instance, he actually says that a 64-bit key has 64 letters! (Remember, every letter in a key is 8 bits, so a 64 letter key would be 512 bits.) I don’t know if mistakes like that are just editing slipups, but I doubt it, since there are so many. These mistakes really make the whole novel an absurd joke and destroys any claim to realism, but I suppose only the more technically inclined would notice. Unfortunately, a number of plot points hinge on these mistakes, which makes for painful reading. For instance, the NSA has secretly created a $2 billion supercomputer with three million parallel processors that can break any encryption in minutes… yet they are worried about the computer being infected by a virus off the Internet! That’s so absurd it’s not even funny. Any computer person will tell you that a virus must be written specifically for the hardware: a Windows virus cannot infect a Linux machine and a Linux virus for Intel hardware won’t run on Linux running on a PowerPC chip. The idea that somehow someone would write a virus for a proprietary computer that no one even knows exists is complete fantasy, and we’re not even getting into the difficulties of programming parallel processing machines, which is a whole different problem. The bottom line is that a virus infecting a supercomputer is about as likely as lightning striking you the same moment you win the lottery. Our author, like so many other technoidiots out there, seems to think viruses are some sort of magical creature capable of doing whatever he needs to move his plot forward.
In the end this isn’t that bad a book. The story’s actually pretty good, if you can ignore all the technical flaws that make it impossible. Dan works too hard trying to establish “deep” characters (he tells instead of shows, a fatal flaw of amature writing), but the characters aren’t really that important anyway, since this is a plot-driven book, not a character study. There’s no depth here! But if you’re wanting a fast and entertaining read (I read this mostly in one night and it’s over 400 pages) and you like codes and government conspiracies, this should do the job.
