Dan Brown Sucks, Too
Dec. 13th, 2009 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inverarityI've never read any of Dan Brown's books, not so much because I've heard he's a sucky author, but because they just don't interest me. I've never seen the movies, either.
Language Log has done some really excellent academic snarking on Dan Brown's literariness, but I just found a couple of excerpts from his first book, Digital Fortress.
Well, now he's writing about things that I actually know something about.
Short review here, and excerpts here.
Oh. My. God.
Where to begin? The language!fail, the cryptography!fail, or the NSA!fail?
I'm not fluent in either Chinese or Japanese, but I have at least a passing familiarity with the latter.
Kanji is not a language! Japanese borrowed Chinese ideographs as part of its written system; the Chinese symbols generally have approximately the same meaning in written Japanese as they do in written Chinese, but the pronunciations are different, and of course so is the syntax and grammar. (I'm not even getting into the addition of katakana and hiragana, which are the two additional native Japanese syllabaries that are combined with kanji in written Japanese.)
Anyway, "kanji" is the Japanese word for the Chinese characters used in their writing system. That entire excerpt about the professor realizing that he was incorrectly translating symbols into Mandarin rather than "Kanji" is just... nonsensical.
Let's suppose he knows he's dealing with a stream of Chinese characters (I'll get into that in a minute). Logically, a small string of Chinese symbols ("kanji") could be either Chinese or Japanese. But anyone who knows either language would immediately figure out which it is, in the same way that a sequence of letters in the Latin alphabet could be either English or German, but anyone who knows either language would only need to read a few words to figure out which it is (or at least, that it's not in the language they recognize).
So the idea that this professor is interpreting strings of Chinese characters and giving "Mandarin" translations (by the way, Chinese has lots and lots of different spoken dialects, but they are all written in pretty much the same way!), and then suddenly suggests translating them into "kanji" (or Japanese) makes as much sense as me reading a string of text and then saying, "Oh, you wanted the German translation? I was giving you the English translation!"
The comment in the blog post I linked to above covers most of the issues with the "cryptography"; if someone is sending encrypted Chinese or Japanese text, it's going to be encrypted. If all you have to do to "decrypt" it is to convert the message into Chinese and then have someone who knows Chinese read it, it's not encrypted! That's like saying that a message in Morse code is "encrypted." Well, yes, in a literal sense, it is, but you don't need codebreakers for that.
Encrypted messages are hard to read because without the key, you don't know how to convert the signal into coherent symbols in the first place! If you can do that, then figuring out what language you're dealing with is the easy part! If they have successfully converted the code into Chinese symbols (whether those symbols are Chinese or Japanese text) which our professor can "translate," then they've done the hard part.
Having the professor then translate them "out of sequence," as the linked blog post above points out, makes no sense. Literally, it makes no sense. I cannot even figure out what process Dan Brown thinks he's describing here. Is it supposed to be Chinese ciphertext? (Kind of like trying to decipher "aHhMmA alvZ gFqoeoA" into "We attack at dawn"?) Again, it's the cryptographers who would have to do that; a Chinese linguist would not be able to make any more sense of the "out of sequence" characters than an English speaker can make sense of "aHhMmA alvZ gFqoeoA."
Lastly, the NSA. I realize the NSA is not exactly forthcoming about the details of its operations, not even to novelists who want to write fictional stories about them. But let's count the absurdities here, which can be spotted by anyone doing even a little bit of Internet research (or reading The Puzzle Palace):
The NSA hires lots of language analysts. You can learn that by looking at their public job postings. They wouldn't need to recruit some outside university professor to get Chinese translations done.
Getting a security clearance is a big deal. The NSA is not going to let a non-cleared person have access to classified material without one. They can't just grab some expert off the street and say, "We really need you to help us with this Top Secret project, but you have to promise not to tell anyone about it!" Umm, no. Yes, I know they do that on NCIS all the time. Anyone who has ever worked for any branch of the federal government falls over themselves laughing at that.
And then there's this:
Are you serious, Dan Brown?
The NSA is a large federal agency. It's subject to EEO laws just like every other branch of the government, and believe it or not, Dan Brown, girls do science nowadays. And cryptography and computer programming and engineering and linguistics and all the other things the NSA is interested in. Like NASA and other highly nerdy agencies full of scientists and engineering types, no doubt there's still a preponderance of males in certain fields, but it's not the sausage-fest you seem to be imagining.
But his main character finds this so improbable that he laughs at the idea that there might actually be a female of the species working somewhere in this boys-only treehouse.
Lastly, I have to comment on the climax, which admittedly I am gleaning solely from the Wikipedia summary of the book. Apparently the villain commits suicide by standing next to an NSA supercomputer as it "overheats" and explodes.
WTF? Is this computer powered by a diesel engine or something? Computers don't explode! Occasionally, a computer that overheats can catch fire. Theoretically, the capacitors in a computer can explode, but it won't make some big Hollywood-type explosion, even in a supercomputer. You'd just have lots of burning circuit boards and maybe an electrical fire. I suppose the villain could commit suicide by standing in the fire. (Umm, cooling systems? Automatic fire extinguishers? You think maybe the NSA has them? Where they keep their really expensive supercomputers? Naaaaaah....)
Holy crap. I know this was his first book (and thus I'm really late to the party ripping on it here), but this is just so jaw-droppingly stupid I am amazed -- amazed! -- that it got published. Was there no editor, at any point, who said, "You know, that doesn't make any fucking sense"?
Kind of like Twilight, I have this mad urge to read the whole thing just so I can snark on it at length, but I don't think I could get through it.
Still, it's nice to know that if I ever want to write a techno-thriller about the NSA, computers, cryptography, and linguistics, I don't actually need to know a damn thing about the NSA, computers, cryptography, or linguistics.
Then again, since those are things I do know a damn thing about, maybe I should write a book about Mormon vampires instead. I'm totes qualified!
Language Log has done some really excellent academic snarking on Dan Brown's literariness, but I just found a couple of excerpts from his first book, Digital Fortress.
Well, now he's writing about things that I actually know something about.
Short review here, and excerpts here.
Oh. My. God.
Where to begin? The language!fail, the cryptography!fail, or the NSA!fail?
I'm not fluent in either Chinese or Japanese, but I have at least a passing familiarity with the latter.
Kanji is not a language! Japanese borrowed Chinese ideographs as part of its written system; the Chinese symbols generally have approximately the same meaning in written Japanese as they do in written Chinese, but the pronunciations are different, and of course so is the syntax and grammar. (I'm not even getting into the addition of katakana and hiragana, which are the two additional native Japanese syllabaries that are combined with kanji in written Japanese.)
Anyway, "kanji" is the Japanese word for the Chinese characters used in their writing system. That entire excerpt about the professor realizing that he was incorrectly translating symbols into Mandarin rather than "Kanji" is just... nonsensical.
Let's suppose he knows he's dealing with a stream of Chinese characters (I'll get into that in a minute). Logically, a small string of Chinese symbols ("kanji") could be either Chinese or Japanese. But anyone who knows either language would immediately figure out which it is, in the same way that a sequence of letters in the Latin alphabet could be either English or German, but anyone who knows either language would only need to read a few words to figure out which it is (or at least, that it's not in the language they recognize).
So the idea that this professor is interpreting strings of Chinese characters and giving "Mandarin" translations (by the way, Chinese has lots and lots of different spoken dialects, but they are all written in pretty much the same way!), and then suddenly suggests translating them into "kanji" (or Japanese) makes as much sense as me reading a string of text and then saying, "Oh, you wanted the German translation? I was giving you the English translation!"
The comment in the blog post I linked to above covers most of the issues with the "cryptography"; if someone is sending encrypted Chinese or Japanese text, it's going to be encrypted. If all you have to do to "decrypt" it is to convert the message into Chinese and then have someone who knows Chinese read it, it's not encrypted! That's like saying that a message in Morse code is "encrypted." Well, yes, in a literal sense, it is, but you don't need codebreakers for that.
Encrypted messages are hard to read because without the key, you don't know how to convert the signal into coherent symbols in the first place! If you can do that, then figuring out what language you're dealing with is the easy part! If they have successfully converted the code into Chinese symbols (whether those symbols are Chinese or Japanese text) which our professor can "translate," then they've done the hard part.
Having the professor then translate them "out of sequence," as the linked blog post above points out, makes no sense. Literally, it makes no sense. I cannot even figure out what process Dan Brown thinks he's describing here. Is it supposed to be Chinese ciphertext? (Kind of like trying to decipher "aHhMmA alvZ gFqoeoA" into "We attack at dawn"?) Again, it's the cryptographers who would have to do that; a Chinese linguist would not be able to make any more sense of the "out of sequence" characters than an English speaker can make sense of "aHhMmA alvZ gFqoeoA."
Lastly, the NSA. I realize the NSA is not exactly forthcoming about the details of its operations, not even to novelists who want to write fictional stories about them. But let's count the absurdities here, which can be spotted by anyone doing even a little bit of Internet research (or reading The Puzzle Palace):
The NSA hires lots of language analysts. You can learn that by looking at their public job postings. They wouldn't need to recruit some outside university professor to get Chinese translations done.
Getting a security clearance is a big deal. The NSA is not going to let a non-cleared person have access to classified material without one. They can't just grab some expert off the street and say, "We really need you to help us with this Top Secret project, but you have to promise not to tell anyone about it!" Umm, no. Yes, I know they do that on NCIS all the time. Anyone who has ever worked for any branch of the federal government falls over themselves laughing at that.
And then there's this:
"She?" Becker laughed. He had yet to see a female inside the NSA.
Are you serious, Dan Brown?
The NSA is a large federal agency. It's subject to EEO laws just like every other branch of the government, and believe it or not, Dan Brown, girls do science nowadays. And cryptography and computer programming and engineering and linguistics and all the other things the NSA is interested in. Like NASA and other highly nerdy agencies full of scientists and engineering types, no doubt there's still a preponderance of males in certain fields, but it's not the sausage-fest you seem to be imagining.
But his main character finds this so improbable that he laughs at the idea that there might actually be a female of the species working somewhere in this boys-only treehouse.
Lastly, I have to comment on the climax, which admittedly I am gleaning solely from the Wikipedia summary of the book. Apparently the villain commits suicide by standing next to an NSA supercomputer as it "overheats" and explodes.
WTF? Is this computer powered by a diesel engine or something? Computers don't explode! Occasionally, a computer that overheats can catch fire. Theoretically, the capacitors in a computer can explode, but it won't make some big Hollywood-type explosion, even in a supercomputer. You'd just have lots of burning circuit boards and maybe an electrical fire. I suppose the villain could commit suicide by standing in the fire. (Umm, cooling systems? Automatic fire extinguishers? You think maybe the NSA has them? Where they keep their really expensive supercomputers? Naaaaaah....)
Holy crap. I know this was his first book (and thus I'm really late to the party ripping on it here), but this is just so jaw-droppingly stupid I am amazed -- amazed! -- that it got published. Was there no editor, at any point, who said, "You know, that doesn't make any fucking sense"?
Kind of like Twilight, I have this mad urge to read the whole thing just so I can snark on it at length, but I don't think I could get through it.
Still, it's nice to know that if I ever want to write a techno-thriller about the NSA, computers, cryptography, and linguistics, I don't actually need to know a damn thing about the NSA, computers, cryptography, or linguistics.
Then again, since those are things I do know a damn thing about, maybe I should write a book about Mormon vampires instead. I'm totes qualified!
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Languages, the NSA and Women
Date: 2009-12-13 11:29 pm (UTC)This might apply (in the Latin alphabet anyway) to "false friends" (words that were once cognate but have since changed meaning) such as you frequently find between English and French (frex, "une fille jolie" may or may not be cheerful but she is definitely pretty,and she's a human girl not a young female horse), but -- as my example shows -- it only applies to single words. Anyone who could actually read English or French would be able to tell that "une fille jolie" is in French and "a jolly filly" is in English, because of the difference in the article and the syntax.
The NSA hires lots of language analysts. You can learn that by looking at their public job postings. They wouldn't need to recruit some outside university professor to get Chinese translations done.
Chinese being one of the NSA's main languages of concern, after all. Now, if the text was in Sumerian, I could see recruiting outside assistance.
Getting a security clearance is a big deal. The NSA is not going to let a non-cleared person have access to classified material without one. They can't just grab some expert off the street and say, "We really need you to help us with this Top Secret project, but you have to promise not to tell anyone about it!" Umm, no. Yes, I know they do that on NCIS all the time. Anyone who has ever worked for any branch of the federal government falls over themselves laughing at that.
At a minimum you must sign a security agreement, which gives them the legal right to drop your ass in Federal prison, at least semi-incommunicado, if you reveal the matters about which you have agreed to keep secret. No Sinister Death Squads required. Real Federal powers are much more effective.
Oh, and yes, you get a trial. Closed-court, of course. And don't expect to get off on a technicality.
The NSA is a large federal agency. It's subject to EEO laws just like every other branch of the government, and believe it or not, Dan Brown, girls do science nowadays. And cryptography and computer programming and engineering and linguistics and all the other things the NSA is interested in. Like NASA and other highly nerdy agencies full of scientists and engineering types, no doubt there's still a preponderance of males in certain fields, but it's not the sausage-fest you seem to be imagining.
But his main character finds this so improbable that he laughs at the idea that there might actually be a female of the species working somewhere in this boys-only treehouse.
LOL!!!
That might have been true forty years ago, though even back then I suspect some talented females worked for the NSA. Today -- well, I'd guess there are probably more men than women working for them, but not by a ridiculous proportion.
Re: security clearances
Date: 2009-12-14 07:24 am (UTC)Dan Brown is supposed to be American. At this point, I don't even know whether he knows his own country and countrymen.
NSA Computers Made of Explodium?
Date: 2009-12-13 11:30 pm (UTC)WTF? Is this computer powered by a diesel engine or something? Computers don't explode! Occasionally, a computer that overheats can catch fire. Theoretically, the capacitors in a computer can explode, but it won't make some big Hollywood-type explosion, even in a supercomputer. You'd just have lots of burning circuit boards and maybe an electrical fire. I suppose the villain could commit suicide by standing in the fire. (Umm, cooling systems? Automatic fire extinguishers? You think maybe the NSA has them? Where they keep their really expensive supercomputers? Naaaaaah....)
Made of Explodium. :)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadeOfExplodium
In reality, while computers can (under the right circumstances) catch fire, I would be very surprised to see one do so in a manner such as to cause instant death to anyone standing next to one. At most, if you stayed in an unventilated room with a large computer suffering an electrical fire, you might die from the chemical toxins released from burning electrical insulation. Of course, you'd have to stay in that room for a while.
Somehow I think that someone would drag you out of there before you succumbed.
Re: NSA Computers Made of Explodium?
Date: 2009-12-14 07:16 am (UTC)Re: NSA Computers Made of Explodium?
Date: 2009-12-14 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 12:15 am (UTC)You know I've read Dan Brown. Digital Fortress was the first one. I wasn't all that impressed with that one, btw. Then The Da Vinci Code. It was amusing. But as much as I love conspiracy theories this one was a bit a far-fetched and I can see why it angered so many Christians.
I'll have you know that I own Digital Fortress but I ahven't read it in years. Lol.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 12:37 am (UTC)Blasphemy doesn't offend me; stupidity does.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 04:49 am (UTC)Well we have one thing in common. =]
simple research fail
Date: 2009-12-14 01:17 am (UTC)I just finished _The Lost Symbol_ though, and I couldn't help thinking all of the way through it that would be awesome if it were read in a Mystery Science Theater way. Some basic location research would be nice - even if he weren't a millionaire author, he LIVES on the east coast! How hard would it be to come visit DC to make sure your place descriptions are accurate? The one that stood out the most to me was being able to see the National Cathedral from the Tenleytown metro stop - you can't at all and there's normally a few lost tourists wandering around that stop wondering how in the world to get there.
Mini rant of sloppily researched things that annoyed me:
-The Smithsonian's storage facility does not count as a 'secret museum.' Yeah, okay, it's exact location isn't widely publicized, but that doesn't make it a secret museum.
-His ability to walk through the main Capitol building after normal touring hours without an escort. Highly unlikely.
-Seeing the National Cathedral from Tenleytown metro is impossible; it's a half hour walk (down hill) down Wisconsin Ave (not Massachusetts - the cathedral sits between the two roads, either will get you there, but Mass Ave is a 15-20 minute walk from the metro).
-The partition in the cab that's such a plot point; there are no partitions in DC cabs (at least all the ones I've ever taken). Most of our cabs are just like normal cars on the inside, albeit with meters (these days) and signs.
-Checking Metro Center for the characters would take longer than a minute or two; it's one of the largest stations in the system.
-King Street metro and the Amtrak station are two different stations with two different sets of track. King Street also isn't that big.
-The big George Washington Masonic lodge may be "just across the street from the King Street metro", but it's also up a huge hill - you're going to be walking about 15 minutes to get to the front doors.
-Locating the metro conductor in the 3rd car? Very rarely do they leave the consoles at the front of the train. Yes, it seems petty, but its also not terribly hard to get right.
Do I feel better now getting that off my chest? Why, yes, I do!
-So this is real life
Yes indeed - Dan Brown suckage
Date: 2009-12-14 03:29 am (UTC)When DaVinci Code was at the height of media froth I picked up a copy and started reading. "Hey," I said to myself, "this sounds really familiar - haven't I read this somewhere before?" The repetition of the previous book's plot was so strong I felt no need to finish.
I'm sure Dan Brown is crying all the way to the bank.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 07:24 am (UTC)On just about every page I flipped to, I found either really bad writing, or something that was blatantly, factually wrong. Usually both.
no subject
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