The Difference Engine

From Freepedia

The Difference Engine is an alternate history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is a prime example of the steampunk sub-genre.

The novel posits a Victorian England in which the Industrial Radical party, led by a longer-lived Lord Byron, took power and in which inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in his ambition to build a mechanical digital computer (actually his analytical engine rather than the eponymous difference engine). Following this success, these massive computers have been mass-produced, and their use emulates the innovations which actually occurred during the information technology and Internet revolutions. The novel explores the social consequences of having such a revolution a century before its time.

The action of the story follows Sybil Gerard, a politician's tart and daughter of an executed Luddite leader (she is borrowed from Disraeli's novel Sybil); Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a paleontologist and explorer; and Laurence Oliphant, a historical figure whose (very real) career as a travel writer is, on Gibson's Victorian earth, merely a cover for espionage activities "undertaken in the service of Her Majesty". Linking all their stories is the trail of a mysterious set of reportedly very powerful computer punch cards and the individuals fighting to obtain them. As is the case with special objects in several novels by Gibson, the punch cards are to some extent a MacGuffin. Only in the last chapter is revealed that the punched cards represent a program which, when run, will prove two theorems which in reality wouldn't be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Goedel.

In the novel, the British Empire is more powerful than it ever became at the height of the real British Empire thanks to the power of extremely advanced steam driven technology ranging from computers to airships. Britain rather than the United States opened Japan to Western trade, in part because the United States has broken apart into several smaller nations: the United States; the Confederate States; the Republic of Texas; the Republic of California is unmentioned, but listed on the map seen in some editions; and a Communist commune in Manhattan. Among other historical characters, the novel features Texan President Sam Houston.