Origins

[jeremyp]

Dear god, you read slowly!

Two elapsed days.

[Nearly Sane]

Two elapsed days.

Well done, have a gold star.

[jeremyp]

Well done, have a gold star.

What is your problem? Is it that you are jealous that Dan Brown is cleaver enough to apply his limited talents to producing a number of very lucrative books whereas you are reduced to sneering about the results on backwater message boards?

[Nearly Sane]

What is your problem? Is it that you are jealous that Dan Brown is cleaver enough to apply his limited talents to producing a number of very lucrative books whereas you are reduced to sneering about the results on backwater message boards?

Diddums!

[Shaker]

Anyway, say what you like of Dan Brown, he writes books that people want to read.

Not much of a recommendation for people, really.

[Aruntraveller]

I'm kind of with Jeremyp on this - he writes page turners and makes a very good living out of it. Good luck to him.

I just object to one poster attaching some kind of importance to what is nothing more than a potboiler, and not a particularly good one at that, I'm talking about "The Da Vinchi Code" here as I haven't read the latest offering - but none of the reviews point to it  being anything more than the same old, same old.

Still. He uses. Longer sentences than Kathy Reichs. So not. All bad.

[Robbie]

I agree with you, Trent. Good luck to Dan Brown for cashing in and capturing the imagination of some gullible people for a while - but he's not a 'good writer'. However there's nothing wrong in being a successful popular writer.
What Dicky said on previous page is spot on.

[Sriram]

Ah!  So at least a couple of people have had something positive to say about Dan Brown and his books.  That's nice! I was getting worried about the people here. 

I was beginning to think that it is probably the latest fad in the West to dislike Dan Brown and his books. Some kind of status symbol.   If you like his books you are sneered upon and no one talks to you any more and people walk away if you enter the room or something. 

In any case, the herd mentality is clearly in evidence here because there is absolutely no reason to ridicule and belittle Dan Brown and his books the way many of you are doing.

I am certain that it is his balanced approach to religion, science and atheism  that is getting to you people.  Laughing at someone is normally a way of getting over ones fear or envy.

There is nothing wrong with his style or his english (Most people here....Englishmen and women at that.... cannot write a straight paragraph in good english I have noticed...no offence!).

At any rate...please do try to read his new book. He  discusses the issue of whether religion would be eliminated by science and technology.....and concludes that it is not likely. 

Cheers guys.

Sriram

[Robbie]

Sririam: I was beginning to think that it is probably the latest fad in the West to dislike Dan Brown and his books. Some kind of status symbol.   If you like his books you are sneered upon and no one talks to you any more and people walk away if you enter the room or something.

Sririam, Dan Brown was not sneered upon by many, lots of very intelligent people found his books (The Da Vinci Code & Angels & Demons(I read both & admit to gettingthem mixed up!) )).

However he is not a great writer in the sense of classic great writers, by which I mean those who will be used as set books in exams.  You have to accept that.

Dan Brown fits in with (old) Harold Robbins, Stephen King, James Herbert and whoever did the Celestine books.  Nowt wrong with any of that & I'm in favour of people making money from popular writing.

[Shaker]

...the herd mentality is clearly in evidence here because there is absolutely no reason to ridicule and belittle Dan Brown and his books the way many of you are doing.

Apart from the fact that he's crap.

I am certain that it is his balanced approach to religion, science and atheism  that is getting to you people.  Laughing at someone is normally a way of getting over ones fear or envy.

Don't try and play the amateur psychologist. Stick to what you're good at ... whatever that is. Laughing at someone is also normally a way of expressing an emotion toward someone who invites mockery - and Brown doesn't just invite mockery, he lets it in, cooks it a smashing tea and lets it sleep in the spare room in the bed that he put lovely fresh clean sheets on earlier in the day.

There is nothing wrong with his style or his english

Careful writers seem to think otherwise. That fact that he's so widely parodied, and that it's so easy to do so (examples provided on this thread), would be telling you something if you didn't have such a man-crush on him.

At any rate...please do try to read his new book.

No, I get off to sleep perfectly well already, thanks.

[Sriram]

Sririam: I was beginning to think that it is probably the latest fad in the West to dislike Dan Brown and his books. Some kind of status symbol.   If you like his books you are sneered upon and no one talks to you any more and people walk away if you enter the room or something.

Sririam, Dan Brown was not sneered upon by many, lots of very intelligent people found his books (The Da Vinci Code & Angels & Demons(I read both & admit to gettingthem mixed up!) )).

However he is not a great writer in the sense of classic great writers, by which I mean those who will be used as set books in exams.  You have to accept that.

Dan Brown fits in with (old) Harold Robbins, Stephen King, James Herbert and whoever did the Celestine books.  Nowt wrong with any of that & I'm in favour of people making money from popular writing.

Classics?!   Who said anything about classics?

You really mean that the people on here read only Tolstoy, Dickens, Thomas Hardy ....and the like? I don't think so.  These are anyway classics of a different era. I bet no one today takes up  Shakespeare for a read on a Sunday afternoon anymore...even in England let alone the rest of the world.

At any rate, it would be very unfair to categorize Dan Brown with Harold Robbins or Alistair Maclaine, Arthur Hailey or Sidney Sheldon etc.  He doesn't just write 'who dun it' thrillers or teenage romantic novels. 

He addresses serious ideological issues such as religion, Science, atheism etc. that are very relevant to the times...but in a popular way interwoven with mystery and intrigue. 

I think he is succeeding in bringing out into the popular arena issues that are normally discussed only among so called 'intellectuals'.  I like that!

[Aruntraveller]

Dan Brown fits in with (old) Harold Robbins, Stephen King, James Herbert and whoever did the Celestine books.  Nowt wrong with any of that & I'm in favour of people making money from popular writing.

No, no, no, no, no. Stephen King should not be on that list. At his best he is a brilliant writer. Read any of his books where childhood is involved to understand what I mean. He does some sublime stuff.

[Shaker]

No, no, no, no, no. Stephen King should not be on that list. At his best he is a brilliant writer. Read any of his books where childhood is involved to understand what I mean. He does some sublime stuff.

I was going to say exactly this.

King knows how to write books that people want to read but can do it well, in fact quite brilliantly; Brown can only manage the first half. Because so many of King's books are long (and more than a few are very long indeed) there's the scope to create intricate plots and entirely realistic, finely-drawn, not always sympathetic but wholly believable characters. Like life itself. In the hands of a really good writer nobody minds going along for the long haul.

It is about the best evocation of childhood-going-on-adolescence and friendship - especially the friendships formed when you're very young - as I've ever read.

[Nearly Sane]

I was going to say exactly this.

King knows how to write books that people want to read but can do it well, in fact quite brilliantly; Brown can only manage the first half. Because so many of King's books are long (and more than a few are very long indeed) there's the scope to create intricate plots and entirely realistic, finely-drawn, not always sympathetic but wholly believable characters. Like life itself. In the hands of a really good writer nobody minds going along for the long haul.

It is about the best evocation of childhood-going-on-adolescence and friendship - especially the friendships formed when you're very young - as I've ever read.

I'll agree and I'll give a shout out in one sense to James Herbert who stylistically was simple but not bad in the sense that Brown is.


That said I think there's 2 issues here. The first is that of style - is someone a good writer in terms of writing well about their subject and I think Brown fails most obviously here, but that's never been a guide to success.

The second is content and I think that he's a good creator of absurd but exciting plots based on an ability to pile various odds ideas into a semi coherent joyride. He's not writing anything deep, and millions of people enjoy it.


ETA: It might be thought that semi coherent is a very harsh judgement but that's true of a lot of very well written books stylistically - Raymond Chandler springs to mind as an example.

[Maeght]

Ah!  So at least a couple of people have had something positive to say about Dan Brown and his books.  That's nice! I was getting worried about the people here. 

I was beginning to think that it is probably the latest fad in the West to dislike Dan Brown and his books. Some kind of status symbol.   If you like his books you are sneered upon and no one talks to you any more and people walk away if you enter the room or something. 

In any case, the herd mentality is clearly in evidence here because there is absolutely no reason to ridicule and belittle Dan Brown and his books the way many of you are doing.

I am certain that it is his balanced approach to religion, science and atheism  that is getting to you people.  Laughing at someone is normally a way of getting over ones fear or envy.

There is nothing wrong with his style or his english (Most people here....Englishmen and women at that.... cannot write a straight paragraph in good english I have noticed...no offence!).

At any rate...please do try to read his new book. He  discusses the issue of whether religion would be eliminated by science and technology.....and concludes that it is not likely. 

Cheers guys.

Sriram

Just accept it Sriram that other people don't like his books or writing style.  Its nit herd mentality at all, just a reflection of  a number of individual's views. To react like you have and look fir reasons why people don't agree with you is very immature. Very adolescent behaviour.

[Sriram]

You people have a very high opinion of yourselves but I have to point out that this is not a discussion about literary matters.  Which author is better and writes on which subject is entirely irrelevant.

This is the Religions & Ethics board and every day we discuss religion and science. We discuss atheism and its merits or demerits. We discuss Christianity, Jesus, the Church, the Pope and the validity of Christian beliefs.

The genre that Dan Brown writes about are precisely about these matters and that is why this thread has been started on this forum.   It is not a general discussion of Dan Brown's or anyone else's writing skills  or about books on other subjects.

No one seems to have read the 'Origins'. Fine. But if anyone does, they will find lots of stuff connected to Christian beliefs, Atheism, future of technology, AI and so on.   This thread is meant to initiate a discussion on these matters regardless of whether you agree with him or not and whether you like his style or not.

But there seems to have been a cop-out...with lots of bluster and pomposity instead.

Typical!

[Nearly Sane]

So if the thread isn't about Dan Brown, which ideas in Origins do you think are interesting and what is written about them in Origins that you is good?

[Gordon]

I've just read the wiki summary of this book and I'm struggling to see it as being any more that a work of fantastical fiction that draws on a mix of scientific and religious themes: an extract from the summary of the plot:

In front of hundreds of millions of viewers, Kirsch explains that he mimicked the famous Miller-Urey experiment and coupled it with various components using the laws of physics and entropy, along with E-Wave's ability to digitally speed forward time, to recreate what he believes is the moment of abiogenesis. This is Kirsch's proof that humanity was created by natural events. He then reveals that in roughly fifty years humanity and technology will merge, hopefully creating a utopian future free of religious conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(Dan_Brown_novel)

No doubt some might find this fiction entertaining on a personal taste basis - but it clearly isn't science, and nor is Brown any sort of authority on science.

[SusanDoris]

I remember watching the original programme on this in the Chronicle series, The Priest, The Painter and The Devil in 1974, entranced at the pieced together and piecemeal story. As it was before videos or indeed frequent repeats,  it was 5 years till it and the follow up appeared again, and then this obviously went onto become The Holy Blood and and The Holy Grail. When this become outed as based on a set of frauds which the writers hadn't really made much effort in investigating, it was fair enough, part of the thrill and an informative example of fake news, or rather fake history.

Someone I knew had become very much gulled into believing a lot of this, so one of the reasons I read it was to point out the woo (although of course the woo wird had not been invented then!)  contained in it. At the time the critical opposition was difficult to find.

That all of this received a thorough examination in terms of the possibility of hidden truths and a parody thereof in Foucault's Pendulum by Eco, long before Brown vomited his execrable novels on the unsuspecting world like a lovely horse with fetlocks flowing in the wind and having a bad case of food poisoning,

A gloriously  magical picture, but I get the impression you did not think much of Dan Brown!!!

seemed to me to sound the end of such speculative semi histories. How foolish I, the immensely tall reader, was.

The original was just part of a huge swathe of books based on an intention to ignore facts for the sake of sensation from the lunacies of Von Daniken to Graham Hancock to those covered in Them by Jon Ronson such as Alex Jones.

It looks almost funny, with David Icke and his lizards but much of it is tied up in a deluded melange of anti semitism, ethnic tribalism and logical illiteracy. For Brown to come in in his clunky plagiarising fictions and sweep up the witlessness of misunderstandings could be seen as a genius of opportunity, even if the prose and ideas are valueless retreads.

Everybody was talking about the book at the time, though, weren't they? As you may know, I have been a member of the Graham Hancock forum since I started with a computer and over the yearsThose with rational views seem to be fewere and fewer, but I persevere because I don't like to leave something after joining. Recently the board called Author of the Month has featured some mind-bogglingly way-out stuff, so I pose some questions which some are offended by and others do not actually read or think about. Rarely are my direct questions answered directly! Have you ever had a look there?

[SusanDoris]

Good summary, though I'd say that Graham Hancock was a cut above Von Daniken in his capacity for rational thought (though that's not saying much). Some of his speculations seem reasonable enough, though he does seem a prophet of doom sometimes.
Jon Ronson is absolutely brilliant.

Early on, Graham Hancock used to add a paragraph at the end of each chapter of his books wherein he stated clearly what was verified fact and what was speculation. I gather that this has faded away for quite a long time now. Of course I have not read his books for a very long time.

[Nearly Sane]

Someone I knew had become very much gulled into believing a lot of this, so one of the reasons I read it was to point out the woo (although of course the woo wird had not been invented then!)  contained in it. At the time the critical opposition was difficult to find. A gloriously  magical picture, but I get the impression you did not think much of Dan Brown!!! :DEverybody was talking about the book at the time, though, weren't they? As you may know, I have been a member of the Graham Hancock forum since I started with a computer and over the yearsThose with rational views seem to be fewere and fewer, but I persevere because I don't like to leave something after joining. Recently the board called Author of the Month has featured some mind-bogglingly way-out stuff, so I pose some questions which some are offended by and others do not actually read or think about. Rarely are my direct questions answered directly! Have you ever had a look there?

I looked at it once, I think in response to knowing you posted there. It already had Hancock's writing as a strike against it, and that wasn't helped by the 'if you remove four letters from this, add in the name of my gran's cat and then look at a possible anagram it says 'cheese are four bangers' which must mean that the Illuminati are behind the bike shed and voting desperately for Debbie NcGee on Strictly.' approach. 


I loved the whole holy blood stuff as a sort of fiction.

[Nearly Sane]

Early on, Graham Hancock used to add a paragraph at the end of each chapter of his books wherein he stated clearly what was verified fact and what was speculation. I gather that this has faded away for quite a long time now. Of course I have not read his books for a very long time.

But he always sold and titled the books on the 'speculation' and the speculation always seemed to be  designed to sell the books.

[SusanDoris]

As Jeremy and others have said, Da Vinci Code was a page turner, even though you knew what was likely to happen, etc.

[Udayana]

Early on, Graham Hancock used to add a paragraph at the end of each chapter of his books wherein he stated clearly what was verified fact and what was speculation. I gather that this has faded away for quite a long time now. Of course I have not read his books for a very long time.

I read "Magicians of the Gods" recently - a few months ago maybe. His books can be interesting, but need to be read as speculative fiction - much the same as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" or the Illuminati books. T.Lobsang Rampa's Third Eye books and Carlos Castenda's books are in the same kind of category.

 They are not great literature and not at all scientific, but the point of them is to kick the imagination to question things from a different place. Sometimes this is helpful. Some of Hancock's speculation/interpretation on Gobekli Tepe  has been supported by professional archaeologists in a study - specifically that they include a record of a comet strike that had a major impact on humans:
 https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-comet.html 

Also his underwater explorations are in sync with understanding of post ice-age sea level rise, and archaeologists have been finding quite a lot underwater, over many years now.

Science does not take a straight unerring path. In the 70's and '80s there was a lot of argument about multi-regional human evolution as opposed to out of Africa. This was, to all extents and purposes, won by the out of Africa side, but is now swinging back to the multi-regional or, at least, a combination.
Jean M Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear" series was fiction, and contains many laughably impossible descriptions. But, some of her imaginings are now mainstream, including Neanderthal/modern human interbreeding. 
 
Unfortunately Dan Brown is not in the same league as any of these. It is fiction and he knows his readership and how to produce books with enough big scenes, characters and plot twists to keep them entertained. That he gets his ideas out of the aether (he himself is not proposing anything profound or interesting) and has a terrible writing style does not matter. In fact, I would say he is writing for the screen, to get hit movies, not for serious readers.

 

[Nearly Sane]

I read "Magicians of the Gods" recently - a few months ago maybe. His books can be interesting, but need to be read as speculative fiction - much the same as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" or the Illuminati books. T.Lobsang Rampa's Third Eye books and Carlos Castenda's books are in the same kind of category.

 They are not great literature and not at all scientific, but the point of them is to kick the imagination to question things from a different place. Sometimes this is helpful. Some of Hancock's speculation/interpretation on Gobekli Tepe  has been supported by professional archaeologists in a study - specifically that they include a record of a comet strike that had a major impact on humans:
 https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-stone-pillars-clues-comet.html 

Also his underwater explorations are in sync with understanding of post ice-age sea level rise, and archaeologists have been finding quite a lot underwater, over many years now.

Science does not take a straight unerring path. In the 70's and '80s there was a lot of argument about multi-regional human evolution as opposed to out of Africa. This was, to all extents and purposes, won by the out of Africa side, but is now swinging back to the multi-regional or, at least, a combination.
Jean M Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear" series was fiction, and contains many laughably impossible descriptions. But, some of her imaginings are now mainstream, including Neanderthal/modern human interbreeding. 
 
Unfortunately Dan Brown is not in the same league as any of these. It is fiction and he knows his readership and how to produce books with enough big scenes, characters and plot twists to keep them entertained. That he gets his ideas out of the aether (he himself is not proposing anything profound or interesting) and has a terrible writing style does not matter. In fact, I would say he is writing for the screen, to get hit movies, not for serious readers.

 

except the Holy Blodd and the Holy Grail isn't sold as speculative fiction, nor would it make sense to do so being based on a fraud. And Hancock doesn't ever come close to saying - this is fiction.