Brown, Dan: Digital Fortress

I have occasionally complained about Michael Crichton’s writing, but I think that’s more a function of the movies made from his books (Congo, Sphere, for instance) than from the books themselves. When I look back at those I’ve read, I remember specifically Jurassic Park, which, after I first read it, I tried to convince one of the producers in the video game company where I worked at the time to turn it into a video game. (Nobody was particularly interested, a point which I remembered with some satisfaction several years later when Spielberg turned the book into an immensely popular movie.)

And, comparing Crichton’s writing with that of another currently-popular author, Dan Brown, I find Crichton to be comparably competent and refreshing.

Brown has his strong points. I read The Da Vinci Code almost at one sitting, basically unwilling (if not unable) to put it down; ditto Digital Fortress. He has his weak points; neither struck me as a book I would never care to pick up and read again (vs. for example Robert Jordan). In movies, this would be called a lack of “legs”.

Digital Fortress is an work by Brown, and not a particularly good one; apparently it’s been revived out of well-deserved obscurity because of the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. The story is what science-fiction author and critic Damon Knight would have called an “idiot plot” — a plot that works only because everyone involved is an idiot. This sort of thing works for Robert Jordan, mentioned above, because the reader very early on comes to care — one way or another — for his idiots. It is difficult to care for Brown’s idiots, all of whom, bad guys as well as good, seem to work for the National Security Agency, which apparently continues to blunder along despite the efforts of evil men in the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to put stumbling blocks in its way. In this book, we are mainly concerned with its cryptographic section.

Susan Fletcher is one of the high-level workers in the crypto section, which has recently put into operation a high-powered parallel-processing supercomputer that can crack any code in a matter of minutes. But a Japanese super-programmer, one who formerly worked for the NSA, has apparently devised a super-code that will lock up the computer indefinitely, and has threatened to sell it to a major corporation or release it to the world. The NSA, of course, cannot have this, since it must be able to read any message transmitted by anyone to anyone else anywhere in the world. (Note to self: no more love letters in PGP.) Susan is called to work by her boss, Commander Strathmore, on a weekend to solve this problem; this prevents her from going off on a tryst with her boy-friend David, a college professor specializing in languages of which he speaks maybe a dozen — no problem, Strathmore has just sent David off to Spain to track down the corpse of the recently-deceased Japanese programmer, ostensibly so that he can recover information that will allow NSA to insert its own back door into the program in question before it is released to the world. And Strathmore has another motive …

As in The Da Vinci Code, we progress through a plot that becomes progressively more baroque and complicated, and makes less and less sense. Ultimately we get to see half of NSA’s headquarters get burned to the ground. On the way, a number of questions are raised, only one of which I provide you for your delectation: why did the Portuguese master assassin, whose job was ultimately to blow David away, insist on killing every poor sucker who happened to cross his path? No competent assassin would engage in such wasted effort.

All in all, a pretty awful book.

Crichton, Michael: Prey

Prey makes more sense, and the writing is considerably better, though I’m not sure that I’ll be reading it again, either. Maybe I’ll go see the movie when it comes out. In all honesty, I don’t expect the movie to be as good as the book.

Jack Forman is a stay-at-home dad, an out-of-work programmer who takes care of the kids while his wife Julia does important managerial work at a company called Xymos. Over a period of a week (unlike Digital Fortress’s single weekend), Jack works out that something strange is happening at Xymos, and then gets called in to try to resolve a problem they’re having. Namely, a swarm of nano-machines, originally designed to serve as a self-motive spy-eye for the military, has gotten loose into the environment and is starting to evolve. This could, of course, prove fatal to the human race. Jack, of course, is expected to solve the problem.

As with a number of Crichton’s other books (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) this is a cautionary tale, and one I have no difficulty identifying with: no matter how safe a technology may appear, the human beings who use it simply aren’t safe. This is another difference between Crichton’s book and Brown’s: Crichton has a point to make; Brown, it would appear, only has a buck to make.

I won’t recommend either of these to the discerning reader. But if you have to read one of them, read Prey.

why did the Portuguese master assassin, whose job was ultimately to blow David away, insist on killing every poor sucker who happened to cross his path?

No real commnt, but I am amused by the notion of a Portuguese master assassin.