I finished Digital fortress last night, having read the most of it during the last two days at the pool at Caesar’s Palace.    I enjoyed the book, but I thought it was pretty horrible.    The first thing that jumps out at me, and kept me from getting past the first few pages of Angels and Demons,  was the way Brown rushes to tell us how great his characters are.  In his hurry, his sentences all follow the same gorged-snake formulation:  “Karen jumped deftly, using her natural agility, into her sporty car, under the ominous building to meet her handsome lover.”  Its not “Bourne Supremacy” bad, but its bad.

The Second thing that bothered me was that the book’s science was suspect.  If you are going write a book on Cryptology that presumes public key encryption has been beaten, you should offer more than three lines on how it was done. Brown offers us: “improved predictive algorithms” and improved “Guessing Engines”   or something like that.

The worst was when the leading lady says, breathlessly, “An unbreakable code, don’t be rediculous”.    Last I checked, one-time pads are still unbreakable.  As are plenty of pre-PGP codes the ex-NSA super genius could have used in this specific situation.

Thirdly, the “evil plot” made very little sense.  In the end, the billion dollar super computer failed to decrypt the message because the message contained a virus which, once decrypted, sent the computer into a tight, infinite loop.    The super-computer kicked out the file twice because it contained  ”mutating strings”, and everyone is shit-pissed that someone pushed the manual override button, but no one seems to be upset that the code would have otherwise remained unbroken  (Remember, these are people who after a hour’s effort say things like “An Unbreakable Code, that’s un-possible!”).  Note to evil people: Throw some mutating strings into your message and the NSA’s 300,000,000 processor super computer won’t even attempt to crack it.

I’m not going to go into the contrived final conflict,  that hinged on the worst bit of cryptology ever found in fiction. The scene was straight of our Austin Powers:  “Before my plan to destroy the world comes into fruition, I will give you a riddle, that if solved, will save the world. Ready?  Ok. Here goes.  ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’”

Anyhow, the book was a gift and it was perfect reading for Caesar’s pool, which I will get to later.