Commentary on the 20 Worst Dan Brown Sentences

I read this article (it's not long, but if you have a writer's bent, very funny) discussing the stilted prose of World-Famous Best-Selling Auther Dan Brown. And yes, I meant to say "Auther."

I've only struggled through--er, read one Dan Brown novel, Digital Fortress. Whoof. He is certainly a Famous Auther, but boy is he a crappy writer. I'm sure he laughs all the way to the bank, and I still have to tip my hat that someone with such mundane talent has made it to Stardom. But with all that popularity, couldn't he afford to take writing lessons, maybe?

OK, this does sound like sour grapes, but surely he can afford a good editor and/or fact-checker. It couldn't hurt, and it just might help. I'm in the book, BTW.

My biggest problem with Digital Fortress, among many (read the Widipedia article for some errors) was that he didn't apparently know the difference between bits and bytes. Cripes! Even in the late 1990's we had libraries with books on computer technology. My other big issue was with the encryption algorithm he had the bad guys using. Determining the key used for a given cipher text is predicated on knowing the algorithm. Otherwise, you might as well brute-force the cipher text directly without knowing either the algorithm or the key. That's non-trivial to impossible. (Let me give you a random string of bits, and you tell me what I'm saying.) So therefore the algorithm has to be known, and the key (which had to be longer than what could be engraved on someone's ring--about 32 characters, IIRC) would have to be long, strong, and virtually unguessable. That is, the number of crack attempts (via a brute-force method) had to be really large and unattainable. A weak passphrase is nothing but a weak passphrase. A much better take-down of the flawed math and cryptography is posted here. The money quote FTA:

More importantly, it doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, you can't decrypt a message with a key if you don't know the algorithm.

My assessment of Dan Brown is that he's not a terribly talented writer, and not very bright, either. But he's Internationally Known, and we all know you don't have to be good to be Famous. It just helps.

But yeah, this is all sour grapes. I can write like him, I just choose not to.