I’ve found it. My least favorite book I’ve ever read. And here’s a review.

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

It’s a techno-thriller about encryption, published in 1998.

Now, it’s certainly not the worst book out there, by a long shot. There are AI-generated slop books, there are indie books that are scribblings by madmen, etc. But this is the worst book out of ones that I’ve actually read cover-to-cover. It’s from a major publisher, and a best-selling author. Amazon rating 4.3, Goodreads rating 3.7. So, it’s a serious book and people do like it. When it came out as Brown’s debut novel, it was a flop, but Brown’s later giga-best-sellers (eg the Da Vinci Code) retroactively made this book a best-seller too by association. So, I’m punching up here; not punching down.

I’ll start with the good. The opening premise is interesting, and it’s a page-turner, as Dan Brown books all are. There’s a story here. Not a great story, but a mostly coherent one. Some of the antagonists are presented with sympathetic, complex motives, although in some cases that evaporates when convenient. In every other aspect, I was basically hate-reading it, as though watching a car wreck that I can’t turn away from. So, I’m going to give the book 2 stars out of 5.

Non-spoiler Premise:

During the 1990s, the NSA tried to stop strong encryption from existing. However, this was a ploy to feign weakness. In reality (according to this novel), they purposely “lost” the crypto wars because they secretly built a supercomputer that could break strong encryption. So, the whole world went on thinking it now had strong encryption, and the NSA could secretly break it all and surveil all encrypted stuff. However, one day (around 1998 when the book was published), some ex-NSA genius Japanese cypherpunk named Ensei Tankado (with strong Satoshi Nakamoto vibes, written a decade pre-Bitcoin, basically the only cool character in the story) seemingly creates a form of truly strong encryption that even this supercomputer can’t break. Everyone freaks out about it. Twists and turns ensue.

Non-spoiler Review:

In my view, this book is weak on multiple levels, from characters to plot to theme to the literal writing.

Most of the protagonists in this book work for the NSA. They’re trying to make sure strong encryption doesn’t exist in the wild. As the reader, it’s written such that we’re supposed to mostly be rooting for the NSA here, or at least certain good elements within the NSA, but seeing their beliefs get *mildly* challenged. In this narrative, all sorts of terrorist attacks have almost happened over the years, and were prevented only because the NSA could surveil all their communications that the terrorists thought were encrypted.

The book is often given credit for bringing up the ethical conflict regarding surveillance by letting the cypherpunk characters in the book (of which there are basically two, the Japanese guy who is cool and another guy who is an asshole) make their case and test the NSA. So, it supposedly “makes you think”. But it’s the super-basic 101 version; the cypherpunks point out the obvious “who watches the watchmen?” argument and protagonists are like, “hmm”. Which is more fair from a normie point of view in 1998 than now, but it's still not groundbreaking. Meanwhile, most of the plot and the stakes are around the NSA protecting itself and its powers. The NSA protagonists, to the extent that they reflect on the ethics of what they’re doing at all, do so for like a page and move on.

The primary protagonists are cartoonish. They're the type of descriptions that get satirized today. One is Susan Fletcher. She’s utterly gorgeous (everyone around her is in love with her and mentally undresses her when she walks by), and she’s the head of NSA cryptography in her 30s. She’s got a 170 IQ (the author makes sure to tell us, because people around her all know her IQ), and she’s very kind. She is presented as having no flaws. (As a reader though, I think she’s kind of a moron, which seems unintentional by the author.)

Her co-protagonist boyfriend, David Becker, is a super hot genius linguist that speaks a dozen languages, the youngest professor at Georgetown, super athletic and nice (obliterates everyone on the squash court and then treats them to a meal afterward). Romantic, friendly, thoughtful, but also humble enough to not fully realize that everyone views him as super hot. Becker has no flaws. Actually, Susan thinks Becker has precisely one flaw- he always insists on paying when they go on a date even though she makes more money than him. He’s “slightly too chivalrous” basically. He has a minor insecurity around his compensation because his linguistics field happens to pay less than Susan’s code-breaking and yet he’s the man in the relationship so has a provider instinct. That’s his flaw. He doesn’t overdo it, or make particularly bad decisions because of it, and isn't sexist. That’s like when someone in an interview asks you what your flaw is, and you say sometimes you work too hard.

The plot is all about this new unbreakable code, an action-adventure to find the private key, insider threats (not all NSA characters are kind), twists and turns, etc. I won’t spoiler it, but I found it rather boring despite occasional glimmers of interest. As soon as something would start to build some momentum, it would soon be fumbled. The opening premise itself was interesting (NSA tricked people into thinking they had strong encryption so they could just casually read it all- and the potential ramifications), but beyond that, nah. For the most part (a few nuances aside I can't mention for spoiler reasons), the stakes are that if the protagonists lose, it just means people would be able to communicate with each other without the NSA surveilling them. The horror. Some spoiler things do add a bit more stakes to dial that up, but then the themes around that are not fleshed out enough. And there are a bunch of plot conveniences, too many blatant miscommunications, etc.

With all of that, I at least expected it to be smoothly written. But it’s not.

-There are huge info dumps of exposition. Just page after page of context inserted in there. No attempt to drip it in smoothly with dialogue or have a character think it for a specific reason. It’s just like, we meet David, then we get three pages of David’s backstory. We meet the NSA Director, then we get three pages of his backstory. We meet Takado, then we get three pages of his backstory. We learn about the NSA’s codebreaking supercomputer, so we get three pages of backstory about how it came to be, etc. My editor would murder me if I wrote like this. It's so blatant, I almost respect it. Just chad info dumps everywhere.

-The point-of-view is inconsistent. Books are usually written either in first person, or in third person limited (ie you can see the thoughts of one character at a time like first person but it’s written in third person), or in third person omniscient (ie you can see the thoughts of all characters). This book moves between third person limited and third person omniscient haphazardly. Sometimes in a scene, you’re in one character’s head, then in another character’s head, and then back again, without a line break that is normally used to designate a shift in point-of-view. Some portions become vaguely omniscient, but then it goes back to third person limited. And then sometimes there *are* line breaks to change points-of-view, even though the point-of-view regularly changes without line breaks anyway. Some authors might try some artsy head-hopping methods and experimentation, but this isn’t that. It’s just sloppy; I detect no particular pattern about the “rules” of the narrator- it’s not true third person limited, nor is it consistently omniscient, but rather it is just kind of whatever the author wants it to be at a given time.

-Word choice and sentence structure are weak. Action scenes are mostly boring.

Attached is an example of the writing from near the start of the book, to show what I mean. Susan’s going to her NSA job, and we have a point-of-view line break to a guard just to tell us, the reader, how hot and smart Susan is. Then we go back to Susan, who thinks about David, and without a point-of-view line break we’re in David’s head now to get pages and pages of his origin story for how he met Susan.

Anyone else read this? I lost five IQ points for doing so.