Digital Fortress
Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press. The book explores the theme of government surveillance of electronically stored information on the private lives of citizens, and the possible civil liberties and ethical implications of using such technology.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
40mentions
38people
2008–2025years
28% recommend38% neutral35% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working. There seems to be no correlation between the quality of the writing and the fame of the book. As disheartening as it is that thousands of great novels are never recognized, it is also awkward that some percentage of awful novels sell well and need to be reviewed.
I don't think we should make fun of Dan Brown, or assume that all of his novels will be awful, but we should take his individual novels for what they are, and for every one I've read, they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory.
For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast: https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny
- > For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.
I thought Digital Fortress was the better book honestly.
*Spoilers ahead* – In The Davinci Code you need to suspend disbelief on many aspects of the book. However with DF, most of it is just regular old US government conspiracy stuff that makes reasonable action books. The main thing you really need to suspend disbelief on is the creation of this perfect unbreakable code, but by the end you find out that such a code has not been created and that actually it was just a virus after all, which is really quite realistic.
It's still just a pulp action thriller novel, but I felt it was much more realistic. That said, I'm basing this on last reading it maybe 12 years ago.
- I loved these books when I was a kid, especially Digital Fortress! This article is so mean and ironically quite clumsily written itself. It's not that funny (although it's hard to be funny when you're being so mean-spirited!)
- Dan Brown Digital Fortress noivel about cryptoanalysis
- On the topic of conspiracy theories and the NSA, read the novel "Digital Fortress"[0] by Dan Brown :)
- Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. I read it 5 years ago. Recommend it
