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One could already see the direction Brown would go with his recipe of conspiring the heck out of the literary world with his first work.

Not as good as Angels and Demons and The da Vinci code, but not as bad as The lost symbol, Digital fortress is the career start of a novelist who used good oldfashioned knowledge in a unique, new way on his way to literary immortality.

The art part is small in this one, as it´s more of a technothriller than the more blockbuster mystery high speed pursuit style of the following novels.

One can see that Brown is still tinkering around with his writing style, not always sure where to go and more trying to go futuristic and techy than uchronic and historic. I am heavily biased towards anything Sci-Fi, so I do definitively just give 4 stars because of the setting, without it, it would be closer to a 3.

It´s very funny that the infamous „I don´t care about technical accuracy, have no interest in research, and don´t ask experts to proofread� mentality is already big in this one, Brown just doesn´t care, the cryptography and tech are hilariously facepalmy. In this case, it´s even more extreme, as it are not just some elements as in the other novels, but the whole plot revolving around topics Brown obviously has no knowledge about, making it unwittingly comedic.

But one also has to have the courage to publish a novel and just don´t caring about it, it´s a special kind of badass attitude and effrontery I appreciate (sorry for that, the dark side strong in me is), although it´s very cheeky and transports false knowledge into poor readers´minds. Bonus points for showing the NSA in a shady light in the year 1998 (and not in 2013, when it became soooo mainstream) and letting his protagonists dealing with the topics of privacy, protection, and the rule of the surveillance, pardon Freudian typo, of course constitutional state.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: