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Comment by schwanksta | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what you're trying to say, but your example of Dan Brown bothers the hell out of me. Partially because he's a hack writer, but mostly because his books are full of bullshit.

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It highlights the potential danger of learning from fiction books; you have to watch out for the actual fiction :)

However I think the Dan Brown books are a great example - you have to side step the made up crap particularly in the lost symbol. But his earlier books have a lot of excellently researched information.

what earlier books? I lived in rome for about 20 years and trust me, "angels & daemons" is way far from 'researched' even at the obvious geographical details.

Though I agree his works do have a lot of crumbs of informations to put someone on a long wikipedia spree :)

Hmm, yes, geographical was perhaps a bit of a stretch for Brown novels. But I did learn a lot about the Vatican, for example, from that novel.

Counterexample: if you know anything about cryptography -- anything at all -- then Dan Brown's earlier book Digital Fortress is downright painful.

Digital Fortress is so awful, I couldn't even get through the first 10 pages.

Err yeh. In retrospect Dan brown isn't as good an example as I'd hoped :-)

Try Robert Heinlein; I learned a lot from the books he wrote in the 1950s. And he actually cared about technical details, as far as the science of the time allowed; he spent hours calculating orbits just to get the timing in Space Cadet right.

Come to think of it, I read a lot of fiction and sub-consciously engage in filtering out the fictional content from the real-world facts in the text.

I'm inclined to believe, that this has helped me become a better filter for the noise/B.S from the real-world too. :)

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