The Difference Engine

By William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,

Book cover of The Difference Engine

Book description

In 1855, London swelters in a poisonous heatwave. The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. However, there is a conspiracy afoot, linking Britain with the France of Louis Napoleon and the Manhattan commune of Karl Marx.

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Difference Engine as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

OK, yes, I know. It’s fiction, and the first steampunk novel too. But I think that sometimes fiction can tell us (almost) as much as factual history about the past, if the authors have done their research – and Gibson and Sterling absolutely have. I can even tell just what academic papers they’d been reading!

It’s alternative history Victorian, But I think it tells us a lot about the real Victorians too, because it shows just how much technology mattered to their sense of who they were and what made them different from their parents. And, obviously, it’s a great…

1990 saw the release of The Difference Engine when cyberpunk originator William Gibson teamed up with Bruce Sheffield. This book set the Steampunk template for using historical figures, giving the historical events a tweak, and then seeing where the narrative goes. The timeline twist they posit was that in the 1820s, Charles Babbage manages to complete his Difference Engine, the forerunner of modern computers, and thus unleashes a technological revolution in the Victorian era. It’s important for the way it probes the social consequences of this upheaval, particularly the clashes with Victorian sensibilities.

I was a red hot William Gibson…

From Michael's list on charting the evolution of Steampunk.

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