Sunday, October 07, 2007

Reading a hi-tech thriller from 9 years ago

I read Digital Fortress this week - nine years after it was first published. So it felt outdated. ;)

Why? The technology in it didn't sound hi-tech. Also, Dan Brown had included what sounded like a lot of needless mumbo-jumbo. Much like in Angels and Demons.

I'm not sure I like to be ahead of the author - figuring out who the bad guy is, who would get killed, what was a red herring etc.

Toward the end, even I was solving 'codes' within messages ahead of the chief protagonist. She and the others took six pages to figure out the final pass code.

*Wink*wink*. Small victories.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan Brown is a dramatist, and a plagiarist. I won't ever forget the lousy Da Vinci Code ending. Maybe I should?

Anonymous said...

I was also thoroughly fed up with Da Vinci Code which I finally read last year, and I remember solving several of the clues ahead of the Professor of Symbology and the Police Cryptographer (hah!) I suppose this should not come as a surprise for a book and author that have been so adulated by the teeming masses. Crichton also disappoints unless one has limited knowledge about the field of science he's fictionalizing. On a related note, I wonder what it takes for a work of science fiction to be believable in its time and also not corny after a decade or so. I'm currently reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and he seems to have pulled it off, more or less. It does help that Mars colonization is still very much in the realm of fiction or that I'm not a materials scientist.