Rating: 
Summary: A tour-de-force of Victorian alternate history. 4+stars
Review: ______________________________________________
The Difference Engine explores a world in which Charles Babbage
built a practical mechanical computer in the mid-19th century.
Britain is thus going through both the Industrial and Information
Revolutions simultaneously. The book combines Sterling's
wildman inventiveness with Gibson's brooding, streetwise
characters, both shoved back one and a half centuries into an
obsessively-detailed and weirdly-transmogrified London of 1855.
Gibson & Sterling explore such topics as dinosaur physiology,
Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarian geology, chaos theory, Victorian
sexual practices, the Red Manhattan commune, treachery & graft in
the Republic of Texas, British Imperial realpolitik, pre-industrial
Japanese robotics, and mechanical-video technology. "Splendidly
extraordinary.... It is stimulating to have one's intelligence
overestimated by such brilliant writers." -- the Times of London.
The Difference Engine is less a novel than a series of interconnected
stories & vignettes -- a combination that worked well for me, but has
irritated others . The book reads more like "real"
history than fiction -- loose ends abound, mysteries are unresolved,
and characters disappear, just as in real life. If you like tidy, linear,
tightly-plotted novels, The Difference Engine may not be for you.
But --
Those willing to grant two master writers a large dollop of poetic
license will enjoy the hauntingly strange landscape, filled with
steam-propelled cars, 19th-century credit cards, and "clackers" -- the
computer hackers of the day ... [The] depth of imagining is
magnificent ... it's an immersion in a fascinating, wholly realized
milieu.
-- from Robert J. Sawyer's review (Google), which is the only one I found on
the net that I can recommend ( CAUTION: SPOILERS ).
lmost every character in the book was a real person, or is borrowed
from a period novel (by Disraeli, himself a character, a nice self-
referential touch). The depth of research into Victoriana is awesome
and a bit daunting. Fortunately, the estimable Eileen Gunn ("Stable
Strategies for Middle Management") has provided the "Difference
Dictionary" [Google sff.net], an essential
and spoiler-free reference, which you should have at hand when
reading the book (it was included in the Japanese edition).
In a "real" alternate world, I'm not sure if history would have been
greatly affected had Babbage succeeded -- his machine would have
been thousands of times slower than even the first vacuum-tube
computers (which were themselves cumbersome beasts -- ENIAC
(1946) weighed 30 tons). And marginally-reliable at best -- Babbage
failed partly because his Difference Engine required technology
beyond the capabilities of the time. In any case, the mid-nineteenth
century may not have been ripe for an Information Revolution --
maybe it wasn't yet "steam-engine time"? But I haven't done the
research that Sterling & Gibson did -- Sterling in particular is an
expert on 19th-century technology -- and their premise is certainly
plausible enough for fiction. And the story is more than strong
enough to overcome such niggling.
I read The Difference Engine when it was first published, liked it,
and just finished rereading it, with at least as much pleasure as on
first reading. It's an oddly compelling book -- clearly not to
everyone's taste, but The Difference Engine suited, and entertained
me. I hope I've conveyed enough of the flavor (and problems) of the
book for you to judge whether or not to give it a go.
Review copyright 1999 by Peter D. Tillman
Google infinityplus.co.uk for original review, with links.
Rating: 
Summary: nice plan, but huh?
Review: i really like reading gibson. usually, it's kind of like running a marathon: it's harder than hell to get to the end, but ultimately rewarding. this one was both an easier read than i expect gibson to be (of course, he had help writing this one) and not as rewarding in the end.set in victorian england, 'the difference engine' is an alternate history: what would have been changed had charles babbage's mechanical computer been a practical reality? i VERY STRONGLY reccomend that the person interested in reading this book do some research on the times and concepts before starting this book. you will get a lot more out of it if you know what's going on before you start. this is probably one of the worst failings of the book: while the background is richly detailed (there is a wealth of victorian slang, social moires, and lifestyle), the basic concept of what the hell a difference engine even is is never explained. the story is apparently about a mysterious series of computer punch cards falling into the hands of a series of characters. the characters have only loose connections with each other, and once the story moves on to the next character, the plot threads are left dangling open for the previous one. just what exactly the punch cards do is never revealed, so the ending of the book feels rather anti-climactic. the concepts and ideas are interesting, but basically the tale never goes anywhere. you keep reading, hoping that there is a point to be made, but the whole thing just kind of fizzles out. "steampunk" is a fun and original idea, it just doesn't completely work here.
Rating: 
Summary: Huh?
Review: Okay, right now I'm on a cyberpunk kick and I picked this book up at the library because the premise sounded interesting: what if the computer ("Engine" in the book lingo) had been invented in the nineteenth century? And what if the government of England had been taken over by and Industrial Radical party that essentially made the industrial revolution more so? Well, after reading the book I still don't feel like I had any answer to those questions. In fact, I don't really feel like this book had any cohesion at all. Essentially what we have here is three novellas, each with a different central character. But other than a mysterious box of punch cards which each of them at one time or another possesses, there isn't any throughline. There are tantalising bits of plot here and there, but none of it seems to go anywhere or make any sense. And the box of cards has no impact; everyone's out to get it, but why? Who knows what it does? Why should we care? Characters appear and disappear with infuriating randomness -- just when you think something's going to happen, Oops! that's the end of that bit and no we're somewhere else. Conspiracies are hinted at but then they just vanish or become unimportant with no explanation. I kept waiting for all the threads to come together and knock me over the head with significance, but that never happened. Some of the alternate reality stuff was interesting, but there just wasn't enough backstory to make it relevant. All in all, the book left me with the feeling of "What the heck was that about?" If the writers knew, I wish they had seen fit to share.
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