I proclaim a new law : Seroim's Law of Believable Protagonists.
It states : the abilities and knowledge of the main character in any given work of fiction must be commensurate with the abilities and knowledge of the writer himself.
I'm reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress tonight, and within the first few pages, the foreign language college professor blessed with an eidetic memory (of course, as a sidepoint, he also has a beautiful wife with an IQ of 170 as the token female sidekick who he will have gratuitous sex with at the end of the novel) already sounds like a total idiot.
Brown has this hilarious quote about modern linguistics academia : "The youngest full professor at Georgetown University and a brilliant foreign-language specialist, he was practically a celebrity in the world of academia. Born with an eidetic memory and a love of languages, he’d mastered six Asian dialects as well as Spanish, French, and Italian. His university lectures on etymology and linguistics were standing-room-only, and he invariably stayed late to answer a barrage of questions. He spoke with authority and enthusiasm, apparently oblivious to the adoring gazes of his star-struck coeds."
1) etymology is a subset of linguistics, so it makes no sense to separate them, that's like saying "lectures on criminal law and law";
2) dialects =/= languages, obviously there's a clear difference between the two, but they are often confused by noobs; in the brilliant words of actual linguist Max Weinreich : "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy";
3) Brown obviously has never stepped foot in a linguistics department if he thinks somebody, no matter how brilliant, will receive "rockstaresque" applause and make girls wet when giving conferences.
Next :
"For two hours, Becker interpreted an endless stream of Mandarin symbols. But each time he gave them a translation, the cryptographers shook their heads in despair. Apparently the code was not making sense. Eager to help, Becker pointed out that all the characters they’d shown him had a common trait—they were also part of the Kanji language. Instantly the bustle in the room fell silent. The man in charge, a lanky chainsmoker named Morante, turned to Becker in disbelief. “You mean these symbols have multiple meanings?”
Becker nodded. He explained that Kanji was a Japanese writing system based on modied Chinese characters. He’d been giving Mandarin translations because that’s what they’d asked for. “Jesus Christ.” Morante coughed. “Let’s try the Kanji.” Like magic, everything fell into place. The cryptographers were duly impressed, but nonetheless, they still made Becker work on the characters out of sequence."
Our genius apparently doesn't bother to give translations in the correct language even once his NSA temporary colleagues tell him his translations don't make sense for two hours straight (kanji being a painfully obvious solution, because they use traditional characters as well as Japanese innovations, while Mandarin now uses simplified on the mainland), and they themselves seem oblivious to the fact that Japanese is partly written with hanzi, while they shouldn't even need correcting in the first place. So much for super-smart NSA cryptography specialists.
lol impressed
Next up, I'm too lazy to dig it up, but there's a "puzzle" where the answer is 3 and the solution is supposed to be the difference between Fat Man and Little Boy. That's because Brown thinks Fat Man was filled with uranium-238, while Little Boy used uranium-235. Our team of geniuses yet again struggle to find the obvious answer, if that were the case...except Fat Man used plutonium as a filling. Oops. The hilarious thing is, to make it work, he even wrote that this was a "common misconception".
Or how about this one quote :
"The old man sighed contentedly. “Much better… thank you.” “Pas du tout,” Becker replied"
"Pas du tout" (not at all) is never used to answer thank you...this would mark somebody instantly as foreign. What's ironic is that we are reminded just before this how Becker's French is "perfect"...so much for that, lol. Brown just translated English word for word, nice research. Then again, the French Canadian says "merde alors!" to curse...which no French Canadian would ever do. That's a very French thing. His whole behaviour is French, being uppity and angry at the Germans. Dan Brown didn't even get my ethnicity right. Fuck him.
I'm a bit reminded of the part in Inferno where that one guy claims his phone is dead to keep Sienna from using it...but Sienna has used it like 5 minutes ago, so she should know how much power is left. Girl is a genius but not smart enough to put 2 and 2 together.
I'm just reading them so I can play "find the plot hole" at this point.
The point is that if you proclaim your protagonist to be an expert in his field with super-special memory abilities, accompanied by a female sidekick with a 170 or 208 IQ (like Sienna in Inferno), they shouldn't struggle to solve little puzzles that anybody with the tiniest bit of knowledge in the field would handily solve. Digital Fortress is about computers mostly, and I've read Brown doesn't know the difference between bits and bytes, and confuses uploading with remote access. He also thinks ASCII has 256 characters. If you don't know jack about computers, you can't write a good techno-thriller. That's obvious. It's like a non-lawyer trying to write a paper after having read Black's Law Dictionary. You can compensate with good research, but it seems that Brown can't research either (ASCII having 128 characters would just take a quick Google search).
Brown already is hard-pressed to write with his bad prose, he shouldn't bother trying to get into the head of super-geniuses and attempt to craft enigmas they would realistically struggle with, because he himself isn't a genius. Likewise, confusing a writing system with an actual language speaks of really sloppy research and of a lack of knowledge about the field, so Brown shouldn't write novels about linguistics professors. If you write that your character speaks perfect French...he should! I'm certain Langdon's adventures are equally filled with silliness, but I don't know enough about the field to appreciate it.
One last thing about Digital Fortress...this quote :
"“The EFF doesn’t have the rst clue about what we do here,” Strathmore railed in disgust. “If they knew how many terrorist attacks we’ve stopped because we can decrypt codes, they’d change their tune.”"
Here's another quote :
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” - Benjamin Franklin
I'm beginning to dislike this book. I hope it gets more nuanced later on instead of hailing the NSA as heroes.
I always smile when people tell me Brown's books are "smart thrillers"...not really, no. Don't get me wrong, they can be interesting, but they require suspension of disbelief, especially when you know just a bit about the subject matter, because Brown's research is so bad, his errors are mostly painfully obvious.
Tankado isn't even a real Japanese family name.
