The Difference Engine

by William Gibson

Other authorsBruce Sterling
Hardcover, 1991

Status

Available

Call number

F Gib

Call number

F Gib

Barcode

417

Publication

New York : Bantam Books, 1991.

Description

The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time with Charles Babbage's perfection of his Analytical Engine. The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the development of steam-driven cybernetic Engines, is in full and drastic swing. Great Britain, with her calculating-cannons, steam dreadnoughts, machine-guns and information technology, prepares to better the world's lot ...

Media reviews

NBD / Biblion
In de vorige eeuw werd door Charles Babbage een mechanische computer ontworpen, die echter bij gebrek aan technologische kennis en de juiste materialen niet gebouwd kon worden. Deze roman speelt zich af in een Engeland waar dat wel kon, met als gevolg dat al rond 1850 de maatschappij diepgaand
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veranderd is door computertechnologie. Ook andere zaken zijn in die wereld anders dan de onze: zo is de dichter Byron premier van Engeland geworden en de Verenigde Staten zijn nooit verenigd. De plot betreft een politieke intrige, draaiend om een stel computerponskaarten die een blauwdruk vormen voor een nieuwe generatie computers: niet langer mechanisch maar elektrisch. De auteurs zijn coryfeeën van de 'cyberpunk': science fiction die gaat over de toekomstige ontwikkelingen van de informatica. Hier hebben ze een roman geschreven zoals een 19e-eeuws auteur van cyberpunk die had kunnen schrijven. In dit opzicht is het een tour-de-force. Bovendien is het spannend en goed geschreven. Enige kennis van het 19e-eeuwse Engeland maakt de lezing van het boek nog aardiger, want het bevat talloze toespelingen op kunst en politiek uit de 19e eeuw.
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Original publication date

1990

User reviews

LibraryThing member rondoctor
Good writing, but the story line just sort of peters out. Most of the reviewers here seem to have missed the connection a running theme of a technological society producing devastating pollution producing suffering among the masses, but not the elite. This connects to the populist/communistic
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revolt, giving it a sense of purpose, and ultimately suppression and a return to normalcy. A related subplot running through the book (especially the last half) deals with big brother's capability to track the lives of people. The vignettes at the end seem to be afterthoughts, as if the authors had left over segments of text that they decided to craft into an ending. On the whole, I found the book mildly interesting, but an unsatisfying read.
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LibraryThing member SlySionnach
I happen to be a fan of both Gibson and Sterling, in most of their works. So, of course, I am a bit biased in this review...

That being said, The Difference Engine truly isn't "Steampunk" to me as much as a historical-fiction based on the past...with some fantastical elements thrown in. It's split
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into three points-of-view with one, secret box connecting them.

Sybil, a working woman who happens to get herself entangled with the "right" man to take her away from her place in England to start a new life in France.

Edward Mallory, whom the majority of the book is based around, is an archaeologist who discovered the Brontosaurus. The secret box is passed onto him, and we follow his tale of sabotage, espionage, and a Luddite conspiracy.

Then we have Lawrence Oliphant, who happens to be behind all the scenes all the time. His bit at the end ties everything together.

As to the story, it's a very innovative idea. I won't ruin the secrets or surprises, I promise. Basically, this box is holding something very important to the Queen of Engines (a nickname given to a mathematical genius) and as it gets passed on to each person, we begin to understand what it does more and more. However, when the secret eventually is unraveled, it's in an almost anti-climactic way. I was hoping that it would have something more important to the story than just a line or two of text.

There was also the weird present tense "photographs" before each chapter (or what I'll call chapters). They weren't bad, but they did jar my from my reading flow.

My other big problem is the last hundred or so pages with Oliphant. Some of the scenes were important in him tracking down the last owner of the box and the one who sent the mysterious telegram, but others seemed pointless. Like him playing with the Prince...the only thing I got from that was that he knew the Royals and had to be called away quickly. I might have been missing something, though.

All in all, though, Mallory's part was my favorite and made the book worthwhile. There's nothing like following the life of a man who is slowly having his "savantry" (scientist) reputation torn to shreds AND he actually DOES something about it.

This isn't going to be the next amazing thing you need to read. Shoot, it's not even going to be "Amazing!" But it is a good novel that will keep you compelled until the last hundred pages, at least.

(Edited to Add: I cannot remove this spacing so...I apologize for it!)
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LibraryThing member RoboSchro
"'You don't mean to say the fire was in my room!'
"'I fear so, sir.'
"'A serious fire?'
"'The guests thought it so, sir. So did the firemen.'"

It's England, during the Industrial Revolution, but not as we know it. In this world, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine was completed, and was a runaway
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success. England's scientists are the envy of the world. The Luddites have been violently broken, and Byron is the Prime Minister. The main protagonist, Edward Mallory, is a paleontologist whose minor brushes with intrigue suddenly become a great deal more serious after a chance encounter with Ada Lovelace. Civil unrest begins to spread through London, which wilts in the grip of pollution and heatwave.

I enjoyed this immensely while reading it. The steampunk setting is brilliantly realised. The various effects of the existence of computers, but not electronics, are obviously a labour of love. (I particularly liked the aside that, as scientists were so important to society, it became a fashion to shave the top of one's forehead in order to appear more of a boffin!) The action sequences, of which there are plenty, are well paced.

Once finished, though, the overall impression is of a flawed book. The ending, which steps back from the characters and tries to convey the importance of their actions through a series of articles, letters and speeches, feels flat after the excitement that has come before. And it only serves to remind the reader that much of the supposed premise of the plot was never really dealt with. The authors seem to have gotten carried away with writing an adventure, and lost sight of the big ideas.

It could have been great, but it isn't. Still, it's a lot of fun.
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LibraryThing member Algybama
I'm a big fan of Gibson and this is the only thing of Sterling's I've read.

Details and descriptions are good and rich (just as I expected) and the plot is generally exciting and fun. However, though the lead-up is one of the best parts of the book, the climax is terrible. Just a bland battle
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without any excitement. And, for the most part, the end is a big disappointment. But the odd thing is that one gets the impression that the authors wanted it like that... a big, weird joke at the end. Needless to say it's a very wacky novel. In many ways it's more about humor than any kind of seriousness. The "touching" or poetic parts of the novel (such as the main character's remembrance of his time in America) come across as heavy-handed and out of place. This is strange, as I'm accustomed to Gibson balancing emotion with humor very well.

The allusions are enough to carry you through. Keats is priceless.

Read it if you enjoy Gibson/Sterling/Victorian society and culture/Steampunk.
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LibraryThing member Smiler69
I wish I could say what I think about this novel, but in order to do that, I'd have to know what it was about, and I honestly have no idea. It's set in an alternate past in the 19th century, there were plenty of interesting bits, there was a lot of talk about engines, which as I understood are
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precursors of modern computers, but mostly, I was just lost.
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LibraryThing member geneticblend
The Difference Engine is a poster-child of Steampunk, and Steampunk is a visually rich sub-genre. Anime and film capture, for example, the armored, steam-powered vehicles with their puffing and chugging, all-a-clacking with gears and pistons a la Miyazaki Hayao (Laputa, Nausicaä), The City of the
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Lost Children, or Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The comic medium does a great job with the juxtaposition of Victorian finery and industrial dystopia as well (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a great example). It's a visually rich subgenre, and The Difference Engine is an album of verbal photographs set in a noiresque thriller. It captures the spirit of steampunk well in all of its sooty, rusty, riveted glory.

The world of The Difference Engine can be thought of as a historical freethinker's wet dream. Lord Byron is prime minister, having successfully championed a meritocratic revolution that pushes science, rationalism and industry to the forefront. Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley are all members of the House of Lords and Ada Lovelace (the world's first programmer) is the darling of this early information revolution powered by house-sized difference engines and littered with stacks of punch cards. In some ways, The Difference Engine is a big experimental playground in which the authors could drop their favorite authors and scientists into government and see what kind of society it produced.

That said, The Difference Engine is true to the '-punk' aspect. It is dystopic and gritty, in contrast with the positivist and high-mindedness (if all too Anglo- and male-centric) of most of its Victorian characters.

I was a little disappointed with the MacGuffinish character of the main object of attention in the story, but all in all, it was a good read. I recommend it to any fans of William Gibson and to anyone who gets excited at the mention of Jacquard looms, Babbage engines and kinetoscopes.
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LibraryThing member elenchus
Gibson & Sterling's The Difference Engine was about as I remembered it. Not the details: these I almost always forget, and here the authors truly shone in their inventiveness and world-making. Factual descriptions of Babbage's Analytical Engine (design, operation, sheer massive presence),
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geopolitical trends and alternative history, and yes, compulsive delight in sharing fashion and other period detail -- these were glorious fun and more rewarding than I allowed myself to expect. Overall, though, it was a solid but not spectacular book. Today I gather there are reams of steampunk stories; when first I read it, I don't think I knew of any other, and that was enough to recommend it.

The Difference Engine itself is a classic MacGuffin: crucial to the story, but mostly offstage. The plot focuses not so much on the Engines in use as about all the people running around them. A mysterious deck of punchcards provides the excuse to tour various parts of London, visit various members of different classes involved in cultural and political conflict. This set of punchcards amounts to a virus, perhaps the first of the age: no one central to the story is much aware of that, however, or even the possibility of it.

//

The final chapter an epistolary appendix: reports, articles, diary entries mostly focused on backstory not the plot. One revelation is that the punchcards sabotaged the Napolean not mechanically (jamming the gears) but algorithmically, preventing the engine from completing the operation, with some higher functions consequently dedicated endlessly to the program. It's not clear who did it. Was the Napolean targeted specifically, or were the cards intended for any engine? Was the virus a sincere effort to answer a legitimate question only the program failed, or was the virus created deliberately?

//

Some of my favourite parts mirror a subtheme of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, in which familiar scientific discoveries are skewered good-naturedly. Gibson & Sterling have a character ridicule the concept of a map usefully identifying the source of a cholera outbreak; Disraeli is imagined not as PM but a journalist; Byron is PM and linked to radical politics. The origins of moving pictures are memorably joined with PowerPoint slides, and the innovation is rued as much in that world as in ours.
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LibraryThing member lkernagh
Hum… I guess it is a good thing that I was already a fan of steampunk as a genre before reading this one, because if not, this would have turned me off the genre. Don’t get me wrong, the authors have created quite an interesting alternate reality of 1850s Victorian times filled with Victorian
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techno (early computer (punch card) technology) and a fair number of significant historical figures of the scientific community. The attention to detail is amazing, but can be lost on readers not already well versed in the Victorian era. Billed as part detective story, part historical thriller, it would probably help readers to have some prior knowledge of Charles Babbage, Ada Byron and their work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, as that work and Ada are rather important parts to this story. My knowledge is fleeting at best so that may have hindered my enjoyment of the story.

I understand this story was a collaboration of sorts between the two authors, which might explain why, while some sections were well written, the overall structure seemed a bit off/clunky. As for it being billed as a historical thriller, I found the action parts to be sparse. They seemed to just blend into the descriptive writing. The detective story also struggles. I get that some important punch cards for the Engine were stolen but I never found out what made these cards so important (an unsolved mystery in itself). The overall effect for me is I found myself bored while reading this one. It would have probably appealed to me more if I had done my own research before diving into the story. As I mentioned above, good thing this was not my first experience with steampunk, or I probably would have turned my back on the genre.
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LibraryThing member scottcholstad
I love both authors but found this book incredibly disappointing and flat out boring. Not at all recommended.
LibraryThing member John5918
I really enjoyed this dark industrial novel in a world where large-scale steam-powered mechanical computers have been developed. It includes intrigue and civil disorder, and has lots of steam-powered machines in it, which is bound to catch my interest.
LibraryThing member Emidawg
What might have happened if Charles Babbage had finished building his steam powered computer. This is an alternative history book in which steam power (steampunk) runs the current industrial revolution. The book is very good, but somewhat difficult to follow. In all honesty while I enjoyed what I
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was reading I often found myself lost as to what was going on.

All in all... a good read but not one you can just breeze through.
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LibraryThing member gypsysmom
It has been many years since I last read anything by William Gibson. I guess I had always associated him with the cyberpunk field which he virtually initiated. This book is a dramatic departure from that although there are certain themes in common. At any rate, I found this book much more readable
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than his other fiction. Maybe that's the influence of his co-writer, Bruce Sterling. I found this great quote in which Gibson mentioned his first meeting with Sterling:
One of the things that made me like Bruce Sterling immediately when first I met him, back in 1991. We shook hands and he said "We’ve got a great job ! We got to be charlatans and we’re paid for it. We make this sh*t up and people believe it."

The main difference between this book and Gibson's other work is that it is set in 1855 but it is an 1855 that never existed. In this alternate universe, Charles Babbage was successful in constructing his mechanical computers (called difference engines) and it completely revolutionized Britain. As a result, Britain was the most important country on earth. The American States never managed to coalesce into a unified country so the USA was restricted to the north east, Texas and California were independent republics and slavery still exists in the Confederate States. Manhattan has become a commune and there are many refugees from Manhattan and other parts of America in Britain. The House of Lords in Britain is the governing body but lordships are not inherited they are earned by people who are have achieved success in science. There are familiar names in government such as Lord Byron, who is the Prime Minister, but he came to prominence not because of his poetry but because of his knowledge of mathematics.

The book centres around a series of punch cards which travel from one hand to another with usually drastic results for the person involved. People are willing to kill for them although not many people seem to know what their purpose is. Sybil Gerrard, daughter of a notorious Luddite, is introduced to them by her lover who is the personal aide to General Sam Houston. Sybil and her lover post them to France but before they can follow them the lover is killed and Houston is badly wounded. Sybil manages to escape taking the diamonds Houston had secreted in his cane and she does go to France. Her part in the mystery is not made clear until the very end. Then Edward Mallory, recently returned from the Americas where he made the first discovery of dinosaur bones, is handed the box of cards by Ada Byron, daughter of the Prime Minister and a mathematical genius. Ada is a gambler who is in debt to some very shady characters who want to get the cards but Mallory manages to hide them. London, in the summer of 1855, is a very unpleasant place to be. The Great Stink, probably a result of the industrial work being done, is the worst kind of pollution with excessive temperatures, smog and untreated waste combined. Anyone who can flees London for the countryside and the rabble left behind smash and burn with abandon. Mallory goes up against one of the ringleaders with his brothers and a policeman because this ringleader is trying to force him to give up the cards by libelling him and his family. Mallory has cleverly hidden the cards but writes to Ada to tell her where they are. Ada, trying to get free of her debts, discloses the location to her debtors who make a daring raid to get them but are killed while leaving the scene. The cards then fall into the hands of Laurence Oliphant, a journalist/spy who has popped up before in the story. Oliphant has no idea what to do with them and he hands them off to John Keats who is a genius at computer programming.

So, what do the cards do? Ah, that's the mystery and I'll leave you to find it out. Read carefully though as some reviews I read didn't seem to catch it.
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LibraryThing member Panopticon2
Wow. It's Victorian Britain, but not as I know it. "The Difference Engine" is my first foray into the steampunk genre, and I enjoyed it immensely. Given that both authors are: a) Yanks, and b) not historians, their evocation of mid-Victorian London is amazingly rich, as is their grasp of Victorian
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vocabulary. So much so, as regards the latter, that I suspect the average reader would find large sections of this book incomprehensible. The entire concept - a world in which Charles Babbage's proto-computer (the difference engine) actually works, and is used by industry, government and the police - is wildly imaginative. This is a book I know I will want to read again, in order to appreciate more of its complexities (to wit, "The Eye," which hints at artificial intelligence). Not an easy read, nor a neat and tidy story, but very rewarding nonetheless.
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LibraryThing member Cecilturtle
To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly. I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but I knew that Gibson is heralded as one of the best: I thought this book might be a good introduction. What a mistake! Whereas I started with an open mind and enjoyed the writing and attention to detail, I
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quickly became lost in the labyrinth of characters, historical and fictional, the overlaying scenarios and the complicated intrigue - there were so many disparate and confusing elements, I decided to stop paying attention and simply finished the book to tick it off my list. I'm not likely to pick up another Gibson for a long time.
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LibraryThing member raschneid
One of the first steampunk novels, and a fun ride through an intriguing, if occasionally unbelievable, Victorian Britain that has stumbled early into the Information Age.

Most of the interest here is in the worldbuilding, the rambling adventure-story plot, and the novel's reflection on the
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anxieties of big data and government centralization that were in the air when the book was written (1990).

The characters are flat and sometimes not terribly sympathetic, but I grew to appreciate their Brechtian realism. The writers succeeded in making them products of their time and not allowing their stories to play out as simple heroic quests. They're a little unreal, but so is the story itself, with its shootouts and convenient coincidences.

I don't know if this book wholly succeeds in its attempts to make profound statements about chance, history, and human patterns, but there is definitely some food for thought in here.
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LibraryThing member xtien
19th century London is plagued by an environmental disaster in which London is covered in a stinking fog. Riots follow, disaster is about to happen.
The main characters in this book are real characters like Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron, Charles Babbage. But the odd thing is that they are completely
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different characters and play different roles compared to their real lives. Karl Marx starts a commune in the Bronx, Lord Friedrich Engels supports him with money, Benjamin Disraeli is a journalist, Lord Byron is the prime minister.

The Luddites have opposed the industrial revolution but they have utterly failed. The industrial revolution, based on huge mechanical computers (miles of spinning wheels and punch cards) are "progress", run by the Radical Party.

In all this, paleontologist Ned Mallory discovers the brontosaur, gets it to London, and gets involved in an espionage affair. He and his brothers finally play a key rol in restoring order and restoring the Radical Party to power. Or does he? His contact, spy Laurence Oliphant, has to travel to Paris to prevent major damage to France. The French computer has been damaged by a malicious set of punch cards (read: malicious software).

In the end, you have to figure how it all ends, or doesn't end, by reading memo's and letters and personal accounts from various characters. There's lots of open ends, or are there?
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LibraryThing member zekizeki
The first half of the book is great, with a vividly painted picture of an alternate Victorian landscape, the characters are intriguiging but ultimately they never really go anywhere in the second half of the book.
LibraryThing member kevinashley
I liked this more than I expected to (based on my mixed feelings about other books by Gibson and Sterling.) A political novel as much as science fiction with a great sense of period, albeit an imagined one in a Victorian London altered by the success of Babbage and his engines.
LibraryThing member benfulton
I can't add anything to the other reviews. Yes, complicated, yes, a fascinating world, yes, steampunk works much better as a visual medium than it does as text. Yes, the plot is convoluted, yes, the characters are rather wooden. I think I would just say that once you get done with it, you'll be
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glad you read it, but I can't really imagine picking it up twice.
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LibraryThing member michaeleconomy
I like both Gibson (see: favorite author ever) and Sterling, and you can definitely tell that they both wrote this book, but the plot was like trying to be crazy, yet not crazy enough. It's almost like they wanted to make it super complicated, but then simplified it a bit too much.The imagery was
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cool, and the characters were great also, its weird though, this book almost felt like it was cut short. Not that I didn't enjoy the ending, I did, but the story felt like there were pieces cut out.
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LibraryThing member lauriebrown54
I thought I’d love this book. I really did. I mean, it’s a classic of steampunk literature and alternate history! But, I didn’t.

Except for a pretty good beginning, the plot moves slowly and a bit disjointedly. There are a couple of exceptions, but most of the characters are unengaging and
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uninteresting. The conclusion is so vague that I had to read it twice before I figured out what the 400+ pages had been leading to.

There are exciting bits, and I enjoyed the use of historical characters who have followed very different paths from what they did in real history. The description- the sights, sounds, smells- is such that one feels that one is really *there*. But the novel is as much- perhaps more- a political one as a fantasy one. The class riots are given as much attention as the main plot, leading one to wonder at the end if this were two books mashed together. Perhaps the two authors didn’t quite agree where the plot should go, and this is the result. I feel a firm editor would have shaped this book up into a stunner, but instead it rather wanders.
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LibraryThing member jhevelin
What an utter disappointment. I'm an avid fan of William Gibson, and though I tend to be wary of collaborative works and had never read anything by Bruce Sterling, Gibson's name was enough to attract me. This book is one of the worst I've ever read: no characters of interest ... banal, simplistic
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motivation ... shallow plot ... boring action sequences ... complete reliance on deus ex machina solutions ... and an ending that just fizzles out in incoherence. At least one of the authors is knowledgeable about how Victorian science has been updated in the twentieth century and has an ear for the cant and jargon of various political and social movements -- but to what end? Complete waste of time. I won't be reading anything else by Sterling, and how Gibson could have put his name to this is more than I can imagine.
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LibraryThing member keywestnan
This is one of my first forays into steampunk and it did take me a while to get into this novel -- but once I did, I enjoyed it. This novel creates a Victorian England where industrialism and an earlier form of computing has triumphed over all other political and social aspects of life. I like to
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care about the characters in a novel, even if they are not admirable people but the only one I really cared about in this book was Sybil Gerard and she disappeared early. Still, a worthwhile read especially if you're at all interested in steampunk and/or alternate history.
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LibraryThing member jrep
Attempts, for Steam Punk, what Gibson's earlier works did for Cyber Punk. Not as satisfactory, on the whole, though.
LibraryThing member isabelx
This novel is set in an alternate Victorian England in 1855, where technological progress has increased up due to Charles Babbages's Difference engine (the first computer) being a success. The split with our history appears to have occurred after the Napoleonic Wars, as Wellington still became
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Prime Minister, but by the time of the story he had been assassinated and was remembered as a villain rather than a hero.

Science and technology rule in this England, they already have steam powered cars (although horse-drawn vehicles are also in use) and the meritocratic Industrial Radical party is in power, with Lord Byron as its leader (which is odd really, as in our world he was sympathetic to the Luddites and his maiden-speech in the House of Lords was in support of the Nottingham cloth-workers who were being put out of work due to the increased mechanisation of the rag trade). Byron's maiden speech is mentioned, and the authors had to explain it away (rather feebly) as being in keeping with what is known of his personality, since it happened before the date their world split from ours.

Seeing how the lives of historical figures such as Byron differ is one of the most interesting things about reading Alternative Histories. In this book, Disraeli is still a journalist and romantic novelist rather than a politician, and Keats has given up poetry in favour of clacking (computer programming).

Once I'd finished, I was still confused as to how the set of punch cards in the first section relates to the other set.
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Rating

(1153 ratings; 3.3)

Pages

429
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