Cryptography in Fiction

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 32. Chapters: Cryptonomicon, Digital Fortress, Enigma (2001 film), Laurence Dwight Smith, Mercury Rising, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, National Treasure (film), National Treasure (franchise), PopCo, Secrets of the Alchemist Dar, Sneakers (1992 film), The Cambridge Quintet, The Da Vinci Code, The Eleventh Hour (book), The Gold-Bug. Excerpt: The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel written by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris's Louvre Museum and discover a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers to, among other things, the fact that the murder victim is found in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentacle drawn on his chest in his own blood. The novel is part of the exploration of alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descendants from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. Chapter 60 of the book also references another book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that this was not used as research material. The book has provoked a popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and Magdalene's role in the history of Christianity. The book has been extensively denounced by many Christian denominations as an attack on the Roman Catholic Church. It has also been consistently criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies. The novel nonetheless became a worldwide bestseller that sold 80 million...