Actually The Hot Zone was best because it was true. Me, Professor Langdon, and Ralph Lauren.)īecause the villain is a warped geneticist letting loose a human-gamete-eating virus, Inferno is also reminiscent of Contagion, Outbreak, and The Andromeda Strain, the best of the genre. Would my metabolism go into overdrive if I studied art? (Another of Brown’s very effective techniques is to put thoughts in italics.) Much of this happened whilst learning perfectly ordinary things about viruses, like the fact that they can nestle into our DNA. His stomach knotted, he felt a visceral tremor, and his insides reverberated. Later on, his eyes went wide, as anyone’s would. I became concerned about his health when, in short order, his mouth fell open, heart raced, hair on his neck bristled, his pulse quickened, he sat speechless, audibly gasped, and barely breathed. Within a few pages, he was frozen in utter disbelief, startled, stunned, chilled, transfixed, he reeled, and did several double takes. Inferno also takes place during a very busy day.ĭue to the time pressure, Langdon’s metabolism is perpetually in high gear. #INFERNO DAN BROWN MOBI SERIES#Robert Langdon (aka Tom Hanks) is reminiscent of Jack Bauer (aka Keifer Sutherland) in the TV series 24, in which incredible action unfolded over the course of a day. But I can comment on the science.Ī MASH-UP OF 24, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, AND DALLAS Having no time for anything other than math and science in college, I admit to being a dunce about the art part of the Dan Brown books. He’s always called “Professor.” Many of my friends are professors, and I have an adjunct title myself, and we don’t call ourselves Professor. #INFERNO DAN BROWN MOBI CODE#I love that film.Īs anyone who’s read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the Lost Symbol knows, protagonist Robert Langdon is a Harvard professor specializing in symbology who is summoned for emergencies that require him to rocket through Europe running from bad guys and heading off global disasters, while following clues and cues in art. So it’s okay if the magnetic poles suddenly switch and a person recovers from septicemia in a few hours with one shot of penicillin. After a week of dissecting The Day After Tomorrow, an exciting end-of-the-world thriller that seems all too possible with the recent crazy weather, we all concluded, as our instructors had said from the outset, that in entertainment, scientific accuracy just doesn’t matter. I learned that scientific accuracy shouldn’t get in the way of telling a good story at the Catalyst Workshop at the American Film Institute, where every summer a dozen scientists learn screenwriting from the pros. But this time, the plot is a stretch, and he gets an F in genetics. The talk is next week, and I had great fun marking up the book.ĭan Brown gets an A, as usual, for writing style. ![]() So when my local library asked me to give a talk about a book with genetics in the plot, I chose Inferno. When Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno, was published last summer, several people insisted I read it – because it’s about an insane geneticist. The mad scientist is a dangerous stereotype - an evil geneticist perhaps the worst.
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