Digital Fortress 217
Digital Fortress: A Thriller | |
author | Dan Brown |
pages | 384 |
publisher | Griffin Trade Paperback |
rating | 7 out of 10 |
reviewer | Carl Anderson |
ISBN | 0312263120 |
summary | An excellent, if slightly flawed, exploration into the world of government cryptography and those who try to defeat it |
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.
You can purchase Digital Fortress from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Faulty Premise (Score:0, Insightful)
More of the same then (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a good summation of how I felt about DaVinci Code. Great premise, middling implementation.
Avoid this book (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:hated it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Uranium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan Brown has definitely improved... (Score:3, Insightful)
Regards,
Brian
If you want to read techno thrillers.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Idiots and time constraints (Score:2, Insightful)
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.)
Not impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
with so many good books out there . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Brain candy. (Score:3, Insightful)
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" [google.com] (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 [niu.edu] 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).
"Insiders" (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Faulty Premise (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd give this book a 2/10 - good for kindling and toilet paper, and thick enough to last for a while. Throw it in your trunk in case of emergency.
Re:My own impression of the book (some spoilers) (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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
Re:My favorite parts... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Premise (Score:3, Insightful)
More like shrinking men and their submarine down to microscopic size and injecting them into someone's bloodstream, then enlarging them again once they're done.
Not everything that people say is impossible is some sort of persecuted idea that will have its day.