book review by yingxiao pls rem to minus my credits

Book review
Title: Digital Fortress
Author: Dan Brown

Summary:
The book is about a cryptographer working in an Agency called the National Security Agency trying to break an ‘unbreakable’ code, the Digital Fortress. Unknowing to her it involved a scheme to kill her husband and win her love. The code was found to be a virus in the end and it corrupted the main data base of USA. Finally the code was broken an the story ended in a cliché happily ever after way.

Response :
The story line is simple and easily expected. There are also too many characters in the book that have practically no contribution to the plot at all for example the system security technician Phil Chartrukian, Midge and some Japanese buyer. The worse part of the book is that the scenes keep changing with each chapter with some chapters only two pages long. I think that is a reason why this book was not made into a movie. Too many coincident also happened during the search for a ring which contained a password to the code ‘Digital Fortress’ that make the plot unrealistic. To add on to that the head of the crypto department is able to wield so much power in the agency is also unbelievably, he can be one of the best programmer at the same time be a great strategise
And head of a huge department that is able to control all the intelligence of USA, he must have been superman. Worse of all, this brilliant ‘super man’ is tricked to bypass the fire wall of his super computer – TRANSLTR and let in the virus ‘Digital Fortress’, which proved to be disastrous. The ending was the most cliché I have ever seen the main female and male character broke the code and saved the day at the last moment! This book is of much lower standard than Da vin chi code and Angles and Demons, the technical aspect as well maybe it was a big hit ten years ago but definitely not now the ideas just seem absurd. And a computer with millions of processor running tin parallel cooled with some Freon coolant overheating and unable to terminate, impractical. The USA technicians are not without their brains, they would never lets such things happen. Think Dan Brown should stick to his angles and god which is more familiar to him and not venture into more technical areas like science fiction.
- Yingxiao