Amateur Megalomania

Wannabe writers are jealous souls.  I imagine that actually publishing a book doesn’t remove that jealous gene, but I’ll write about that on the day I cross that threshold, if ever.  For now, I’ll confine myself to raging impotently against the injustice represented by Sue Grafton, the prolific estate of V.C. Andrews, or Dan Brown.

I wrote recently about The Da Vinci Code.  Quick recap – spectacular crap.  The best, worst book I’ve read in years.

Look, I think I have a reasonable perspective on my own writing abilities.  I know I’m not yet worthy of people paying to read my words.  I have a long way to go.

Dan Brown’s success tells me that maybe I’m trying too hard.

Nothing personal against Mr. Brown.  I’m sure he’s a great guy, with his diamond encrusted keyboard, disposable Gulfstreams, and an Antonov-225 to carry around his entertainment fund.

I felt compelled to add to his slush fund when I saw Angels and Demons one day at the grocery store.  Now, I don’t normally shop for books at the grocery store, but I was having one of those days.  You know the kind.  When you’re there for one or two items, and you feel like you should buy some other stuff just out of principle.  You’ve drove to the store, walked a half-mile from the parking lot, and it just seems kind of silly to leave with a gallon of milk.

Milk?  Check.

Oil Filter?  Check.

Little doo-dad USB hub for the laptop?  What a minute…if I’m deploying enough USB devices to need a hub, maybe I should be at home on the desktop?  Do I really want to deploy a printer, scanner, video camera, web cam and whatever else while sipping a latte?  “Sir, may I interest you in a scone, or perhaps some Articles of Incorporation and a long term lease?”

Back to the checklist.

Schlock paperback?  Check.

So I acquire another Dan Brown book.  Am I embarrassed?  Not when the checkout clerk says “I LOVED The Da Vinci Code!  It was awesome.”

No accounting for taste in the world.  Not when Dan Brown has a fleet of yachts he could use to play live-action Battleship, every night of the week.

The Da Vinci Code (TDVC) was the second book in the Robert Langdon ‘series’ (I think there is another coming…Brown is hammering it out on his custom-made heuristic Hal 9000 (now with inhibited service pod control!)).  In TDVC, our hero gets a phone call in the middle of the night telling him a man he had never met had been murdered and butchered in some strange, arcane manner.

Angels and Demons opens with our hero getting a phone call in the middle of the night telling him a man he had never met had been murdered and butchered in some strange, arcane manner.

I can’t wait to see how the next book starts.  Maybe Langdon needs an answering service.  It would save lives.

The body in question resides at CERN, the nuclear research center in Europe.  You know, the one with the massive particle accelerator buried deep underground?  CERN sends a Mach 15 space plane to pick Langdon up in Boston and rush him to CERN in about an hour.  Because they were having some really great incentives when they bought the accelerator.  “If you buy now, you’ll get this Mach 15 space plane at no extra charge….wait, but there’s more!”

As the story starts to gather momentum, we learn the murdered physicist was really a priest who was trying to prove Genesis by creating anti-matter (something from nothing).  [Aside - my education is in physics.  It is difficult for me to wade through pages of pseudo-science like this...and I love science fiction!  So that should tell you something of the quality of the science found here.]  It seems that creating anti-matter is sufficient to prove the existence of God.  I’ll leave the trivial proof to you as an exercise.

In what might be the most ludicrous passage in memory, the director of CERN, whom is portrayed as a rabid man of science, is stunned by this discovery.  The murdered scientist (and his brilliant but predictably beautiful daughter) were doing all of this on the QT…never mind the super-custom high tech equipment constructed underneath CERN, or the three foot thick steel-walled ‘annihilation’ chamber that they must have cobbled together using a Radio Flyer wagon and a couple of hammers.  Oh, and they fired up the accelerator and drained the power supply of France to rustle up a visible quantity of anti-matter, all when no one was looking.

But back to the director!  He seems to have very little understanding of this ‘anti-matter’.  When the brilliant (and beautiful!) daughter explains the magnetic bottle system that keeps the anti-matter suspended in a vacuum and away from the walls of the vessel, the Director seems astounded that magnetism can, like, repel stuff.

On second thought, maybe the director might have missed all of that heavy construction going on down below.  After all, who is he to argue with the magical earth dragons when they wish to shake their backs and make the earth tremble?

Then our heroes note the absence of a large sample of anti-matter, followed by evidence that the anti-matter has been hidden inside the Vatican, where the Pope has just died and the conclave, attended by every Cardinal on Earth, is about to begin.  It seems the Illuminati wants to eradicate the Catholics, and what better way than to kill a physicist, rip out his eye to defeat the retina scanner, smuggle out a gram of anti-matter, fly to Rome, hide it in the Vatican, and then give Robert Langdon six hours to find it and save the day.  Had the Illuminati read The Da Vinci Code, they might have noticed some flaws with this plan.  But of course that would violate causality since this story came first.  Maybe CERN has something lying around to solve that problem too.

So I’m on page 200.  I spend a lot of time thinking about Dan Brown’s gold plated socks.

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)