The Difference Engine

This article is about the novel. For the machine designed by Charles Babbage, see Difference engine. For the album by Beaver, see The Difference Engine (album).

The Difference Engine

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Language	English
Genre	Alternate history, steampunk
Publisher	Victor Gollancz Ltd
Publication date	September 1990
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	383 pp (Paperback – 429 pages)
ISBN	0-575-04762-3
OCLC	21299781

The Difference Engine (1990) is an alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk.

It posits a Victorian-era Britain in which great technological and social change has occurred after entrepreneurial inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in his ambition to build mechanical computers.

The novel was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in 1990, the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991, and both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prix Aurora Award in 1992.

Setting

The novel is chiefly set in 1855. The fictional historical background diverges from our timeline around 1824, at which point Charles Babbage completes his difference engine and proceeds to develop an Analytical Engine. He becomes politically powerful and at the 1830 general election successfully opposes the Tory Government of the Duke of Wellington. Although Wellington stages a coup d'état in 1830 in an attempt to overturn his defeat and prevent the acceleration of technological change and social upheaval, he is assassinated in 1831. The Industrial Radical Party, led by a Lord Byron who survives the Greek War of Independence, comes to power. The Tory Party and hereditary peerage are eclipsed, and British trade unions assist in the ascendancy of the Industrial Radical Party (much as they aided the Labour Party of Great Britain in the twentieth century in our own world). As a result, Luddite anti-technological working class revolutionaries are ruthlessly suppressed.

By 1855, the Babbage computers have become mass-produced and ubiquitous, and their use emulates the innovations that actually occurred during our information technology and Internet revolutions. Other steam-powered technologies have also developed and so, for example, Gurney steam carriages become increasingly common. The novel explores the social consequences of an information technology revolution in the nineteenth century, such as the emergence of "clackers" (a reference to hackers), technologically-proficient people, such as Théophile Gautier, who are skilled at programming the Engines through the use of punched cards.

In the novel, the British Empire is more powerful than in our reality because of the development and the use of extremely-advanced steam-driven technology in industry. In addition, similar military technology has enhanced the capabilities of the armed forces (airships, dreadnoughts, and artillery) and the Babbage computers themselves. Under the Industrial Radical Party, Britain shows the utmost respect for leading scientific and industrial figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Darwin. Indeed, they are collectively called "savants" and often raised to the peerage on their merits, causing a break with the past as regards social prestige and class distinction. The new patterns are also reflected in the educational sphere: classical studies have lost importance to more practical concerns such as engineering and accountancy.

Britain, rather than the United States, opened Japan to Western trade, in part because the United States became fragmented by interference from a Britain that foresaw the implications of a unified United States on the world stage. Counterpart successor states to our world's United States include a (truncated) United States; the Confederate States of America; the Republic of Texas; the Republic of California; a communist Manhattan Island commune (with Karl Marx as a leading light); British North America (analogous to Canada, albeit slightly larger in this world); and Russian America (Alaska). Napoleon III's French Empire holds an entente with the British, and Napoleon is even married to a British woman.

In the world of The Difference Engine, France occupies Mexico, as it did briefly in reality during the American Civil War. Like Great Britain, it has its own analytical/difference engines (ordinateurs), especially used in the context of domestic surveillance within its police force and intelligence agencies. As for the other world powers, Germany remains fragmented, with no suggestion that Prussia will eventually form the core of a unified nation, as it did in our own timeline in 1871, which may be caused by French sabotage analogous to that pursued in the case of the fragmentation of the United States noted above. Japan is awakening after the British ended its isolation, and looks, as in our timeline, set to become one of this world's leading industrial and economic powers from the 20th century onward.

The intervention of Lords Byron and Babbage provide famine relief with grain confiscated from the landed aristocracy. The Great Famine of Ireland never occurred, there is no agitation for Irish home rule or Irish independence and the Irish instead have become enthusiastic supporters of the Radical regime. A Spanish Civil War is mentioned to be taking place in 1855 with one side being the Royalists, and in 1905, possibly as a result of that conflict, there is an independent Republic of Catalonia.

Among other historical characters, the novel features "Texian" President Sam Houston, as an exile after a political coup in Texas, a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley (as a Luddite), John Keats as a kinotropist (an operator of mechanical pixellated screens), and Benjamin Disraeli as a publicist and tabloid writer.

Plot

In 1855, Sybil Gerard, a political courtesan and daughter of an executed Luddite leader, is recruited by Mick Radley, one of her clients and secretary to Sam Houston, to help Houston's cause in Britain. He has her send a case of punch cards to Paris and plants her in the audience of Huston's speech to make a stronger impact on the British audience. A Texian assassin, waiting to kill Houston in his hotel room, murders Radley and injures Houston. With Radley dead, Sybil leaves for Paris after she sends a telegram to Charles Egremont, an MP and a former lover of hers, stating that she knows his secret.

Edward Mallory, a palaeontologist and explorer, while visiting his friends participating in a gurney race derby, encounters Lady Ada Byron being mistreated by a man and a woman inside a horse-carriage. After Mallory fights the man and woman over their treatment of Lady Byron, she gives Mallory a case containing punch cards and returns to her family. Mallory hides the case in the partially-built skull of the exhibit of the dinosaur he discovered, the Brontosaurus. The man, fashioning himself 'Captain Swing', threatens to 'destroy' Mallory unless he returns the punch cards. As part of his attempts, Swing places the blame of the death of Mallory's rival, Rudwick, on him. Laurence Oliphant meets Mallory to offer him police protection. Oliphant argues Rudwick died as a result of a conspiracy and Mallory could be the next target, given that both received sponsorship for their research work in return for supplying arms to Native American tribes as a means of keeping US ambitions at bay. Mallory agrees to Oliphant's offer after he is tailed and attacked. Mallory identifies Florence Bartlett, the woman he saw with Lady Byron at the derby, with the help of Andrew Wakefield, Oliphant's contact at the Central Bureau of Statistics, which keeps records of criminals. It is suggested that Bartlett brought the case of punch cards back from France to England. Mallory sends Lady Byron a letter which reveals the location of the case of punch cards.

'The Stink', a major episode of pollution in which London swelters under an inversion layer (comparable to the London Smog of December 1952) causes much of London's elite to leave the city. Mallory is accompanied by Ebenezer Fraser, a secret police officer, as he goes about his business in the city, but who is attacked as order breaks down. Mallory leaves Fraser at the station and meets Hetty, who now lives in Sybil's flat. Mallory spends the night with Hetty at Whitechapel, and leaves the next morning to notice the further collapse of order in the city as the Stink persists. Making his way back to the Palace of Palaeontology, he notices advertisements commissioned by Swing that claim Mallory murdered Rudwick and decry the excesses of the rule of savants. After meeting his brothers at the Palace and hearing that their sister's engagement was broken thanks to rumours spread about her infidelity by Swing, Mallory gathers them and Fraser, who has recovered, to attack Swing. They infiltrate Swing's location, noting that communists from Manhattan are supporting Swing. After recognising Florence Bartlett as a lecturer among them, Mallory and his group fight them off until the rain ends the Stink and a river ironclad fires at Swing's location. Fraser apprehends Swing.

A year later, Oliphant has dreams of an all-seeing Eye. He identifies the assassin responsible for murdering Mick Radley, having been himself poisoned by Bartlett. After the Prime Minister, Lord Byron, died during the Stink and is replaced by Brunel, Charles Egremont has started removing rivals from his way to hide his past as a one-time associate of Sybil Gerard's father. Florence Bartlett is informed by Lady Byron of the location of the case of cards but is killed in a firefight with policemen and soldiers as she tries to escape. Oliphant secures the telegram Sybil sent Egremont with Wakefield's help, but one of Oliphant's officers is captured by members of an agency affiliated with Egremont. Oliphant heads for Paris himself to meet Sybil, intending to get her testimony with which to blackmail Egremont. It is revealed that the case of punch cards, when sent to Paris, was run through France's equivalent Engine by an independent 'clacker', causing it to keep attempting to solve the programme but failing to do so. The punch cards contain proof of two theorems, which, in reality, would not be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Gödel. Lady Byron delivers a lecture on the subject in France, with the narrator describing her as 'The Mother'. She is chaperoned by Fraser while Sybil, who attended her lecture, mocks her afterwards. At the very end of the novel, in 1991, a vast Engine simulates the humans that preceded its existence to produce new conjectures. This Engine reveals itself as the narrator, it possessing the Eye, as it achieves self-awareness.

Characters

• The character Michael Godwin was named after attorney Mike Godwin to thank for his technical assistance in linking Sterling and Gibson's computers, which allowed them to collaborate between Austin and Vancouver.
• The characters of Sybil Gerard; her father, Walter Gerard; Charles Egremont; and Dandy Mick are all borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil

Literary criticism and significance

The novel has attracted the attention of scholars, including Jay Clayton, who explores the book's attitude toward hacking, as well as its treatment of Babbage and Ada Lovelace; Herbert Sussman, who demonstrates how the book rewrites Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil; and Brian McHale, who relates it to the postmodern interest in finding a "new way of 'doing' history in fiction."

The novel was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in 1990, the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991, and both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prix Aurora Award in 1992.

Influence

The 1993 video game The Chaos Engine (released as Soldiers of Fortune in the USA) was based on The Difference Engine.

External links

• The Difference Dictionary, an indexed addendum of topics discussed in the novel, compiled by Eileen Gunn
• Editions of The Difference Engine at WorldCat.org
• The Difference Engine at Worlds Without End
• Review at Infinity-plus
• "Gibson and Sterling's Alternative History: The Difference Engine as Radical Rewriting of Disraeli's Sybil"