Dan Brown - Inferno

'unnecessary tautology'. Brilliant!
Had to look up 'pulchritudinous ' though. :-)
 
I fail to see what is so brilliant about it. I mean, there are unnecessary tautologies and unnecessary tautologies.
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True. :)
 
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This is about to devolve into a Monty Python sketch.
 
I am betting the Legitimate Scholars of Dante will have fun ripping the book to shreds.
Even if Brown was a halfway decent thriller writer..which he ain't,not by a long shot...I would have a hard time dealing with the amount of Crackpot History he peddles in his books.And Yes, he is peddling it,though he tries to have it both way with the "although fiction, it is based on Solid Historical Research" routine he uses.
 
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I predict that Dan Brown's next novel will be about the Turin Shroud, and its title will be "Touching Cloth". If that turns out to be true, I think Randi owes me a million bucks. Or possibly not, because as predictions go, that one's not all that unpredictable.
 
Hecubas said:
My God!

"No Inferno thread yet?", thought the six foot one, tattoo-less man as he browsed the esoteric vaults of the JREF forums. Maybe they're better than that.

Or maybe not.
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Is the monkey still pounding on that typewriter?

Or?!! did he burn up in a really big fire???!!!!!

:confused::D:D:D
 
This is another good parody of the book/author/genre.

Seven kilometres out into the azure waters of the Adriatic, the Provost – the head of a top-secret organisation called the Cornsortium, which specialised in contriving idiotic plotlines – stood at the prow of his 237m yacht, the Mendacium. I may have finally taken on a plotline too stupid even for me, he thought.

"I keep seeing visions of a woman with Medusa-like grey hair," Langdon murmured. "Perhaps that means the key to unlocking this mystery is to be found in Botticelli's map of the world and in the works of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the major Italian poet of the Middle Ages."

Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, CEO of the World Health Organisation, combed her Medusa-like grey hair and thought unnecessarily of the glucocorticoid treatment that had destroyed her reproductive system. Her mind then switched to that fateful meeting she had had with Bertand Zobrist.
"The population of the world is growing too fast," the billionaire geneticist had said urgently. "If we are not careful, there will soon be eight billion Dan Brown readers. We must have a cull."
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Since this is a fairly silly thread, let's have fun predicting what the fifth book in the series will be about. So far we have:

Angels and Demons - Art historian Robert Langdon is unexpectedly whisked off to Switzerland in a top secret spaceship to find a missing atom bomb which a murdered scientist built by himself in his spare time with the Large Hadron Collider to prove that God exists, and which has been stolen by the Bavarian Illuminati to blow up the Pope, and... Actually I'm making this sound a lot better than it is! Anyway, because all policemen not trained in the USA are incredibly stupid, the art professor solves the mystery thanks to his amazing ability to pass IQ tests set by long-dead sculptors (admittedly not something that the police have to deal with in the course of the average murder investigation, so maybe their ignorance can be excused).

The Da Vinci Code - Exactly the same plot, minus the ticking bomb, but everyone behaves as if there is one because Dan Brown's contract had run out and he simply couldn't be bothered. The best bit is when Robert Langdon explains that the Disney version of The Little Mermaid contains secret symbolism proving that Jesus was married, and somehow keeps his job at Harvard. But then, so did John Mack. This book also taught me the useful fact that quantum entanglement causes fish telepathy.

The Lost Symbol - You know what? When a so-called "author comes up with a title that generic, he isn't even trying any more (not that he was trying very hard to begin with). So I was never interested enough in this book to bother finding out what it was about. Presumably there's a symbol, it's lost, and Robert Langdon finds it by passing IQ tests helpfully pre-arranged hundreds of years ago by famous painters, while a religious weirdo murders people and evades capture because policemen are, as we know, so inept at catching murderers that art historians have to do it for them.

Inferno - I don't know what happens in this one either, but obviously a famous book written hundreds of years ago is somehow an IQ test which Robert Langdon must solve in order to capture the usual homicidal religion-crazed nutter before he does something really bad. And possibly he rescues Jon Pertwee from a parallel universe in which the world's going to melt, and quite right too because they're all Nazis. Oh, who cares?

Robert In Wonderland - Shamelessly pinching the not very popular conspiracy theory that Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper and admitted it in the Alice books (you just have to rearrange the letters), Dan Brown plunges Robert Langdon into a murder mystery which for some reason revolves around famous Victorian paintings and the Tenniel illustrations for the Alice books. He must stop the madman known only as the Monarch of the Glen, a seven-foot Scotsman with acromegaly and a huge pair of strap-on antlers who wanders around chopping people in half with a claymore, but isn't quite conspicuous enough for the non-American and therefore sub-moronic police to catch. He is of course the hit-man of a fanatical inner cell of the Elks (Dan Brown's running out of secret societies his readers have heard of), who plan to use their orbital Bond Villain death-laser to melt Glasgow, thus killing both the Dalai Lama, who intends to announce an amazing secret during his tour of Scotland, and a local chip-shop owner (with the obligatory pretty daughter for the hero to get off with) who - this is the big secret! - is actually Maitreya the Future Buddha.

Well, based on existing trends, that's my guess. Anyone else care to have a go? Whoever's closest can pretend they've won a prize.
 
And Brown swiped the "Insane Billionaire who wants to solve the world's population problem by drastic means" villian straight from Tom Clancy's "Rainbow 6".
 
JohnG said:
I applaud anyone who attempts to derail a discussion of Dan Brown with references to Dante and/or Doctor Who.
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Do you hear that? It is the world screaming as it dies! But we might save my world. My Liz.
 
dudalb said:
And Brown swiped the "Insane Billionaire who wants to solve the world's population problem by drastic means" villian straight from Tom Clancy's "Rainbow 6".
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But will probably create a far less entertaining series of FPS games.
 
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