The Difference Engine

The Difference Engine ( engl. The Difference Engine, 1990) is an alternative history of the world of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is an outstanding example of the steampunk sub-genre.

Content

In the Victorian England of the novel industrial radicals ruled Party under the leadership of a longer-lived Lord Byron, while the inventor Charles Babbage successfully built a mechanical computer (actually, the Analytical Engine, not the Difference Engine). Success will be economically exploited by the mass production of steam machines that provide a precipitous progress. This steam computers are used for those applications for which there are actually solutions in the real world only in today's era of information technology and Internet revolution. The novel examines the social consequences of such a revolution that occurred a century before their time, and so shines a light on our own reactions to all to rapid progress.

The story shows the fate of Sybil Gerard, daughter of a Luddite agitator executed, which has become a prostitute to arise from the upper classes, by Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a paleontologist and explorer, and Laurence Oliphant, a diplomat and spy. Your individual destinies are entwined around a mysterious hole deck of cards that will be very powerful. As in other stories of Gibson, the stack is largely a MacGuffin.

In the novel, the British Empire is more powerful than ever in its real history. This is the use of well-developed steam-powered devices from computers to give thanks to airships. Japan is a colony, the U.S. is broken up into individual states. Texas is ruled by President Sam Houston, one of many real historical figures.

Criticism

It was emphasized in discussions of the book that described the world only constructed a literary environment that points despite all the colored decorations on our present and its problems.

Book editions

• The Difference Engine. Victor Gollancz, London 1990.
• The difference machine. Heyne, 1992, ISBN 978-3-453-05380-9.
• The difference machine. Heyne, 2012, ISBN 978-3-453-52672-3.