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 The Difference Engine |
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The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990) It is a difficult read, The Difference Engine; even if you read it in your native language. Many of my friends didn’t make it through the first chapter. I read it about ten years ago, but couldn’t remember much of it. I had to reread it in order to give a review here. And it has to be reviewed here, for it is the first true steampunk book. Now it can be argued if The Difference Engine was the first book in the genre, but it gave it’s name to it. Gibson and Sterling are both cyberpunk authors, and in The Difference Engine they put the plot of a cyberpunk story into an alternate Victorian Age, when the machines ran on steam. Steam + cyberpunk = steampunk. The story is rather normal for a cyberpunk story. There is techniques, there are machines, there are the downtrodden masses that are ruled by an upper class with hidden agendas. There is data, information, that changes owner and can be illegal or dangerous to men or machine. Yet, it’s not about hackers; we do not learn how people use the machines for their own purposes; even if Lady Ada Byron can be seen as a hacker - we do not learn much about this intriguing person in this story. The plot, however, I found a bit vague - if there was one in the first place. You have to do a lot of thinking yourself, and things like “who dunnit?” are not explained, and in the end, I can’t really tell what the fuzz was all about, and parts were really useless and boring, giving nothing to the story but confusion. Furthermore, the style of writing changes in the book, so I sometimes got the idea I was reading a totally different book all of a sudden. I guess you have to like these kind of stories - I didn’t. The setting is of course what was different from cyberpunk at the time. It’s Earth nineteenth century (1855), but not as we know it. Not only are there advanced techniques that have not been known on Earth at the time, this alternative world has also different politics. But I found it not convincing that techniques were the base of these changes, or the other way around. Basically, I had the feeling that the setting was a gimmick to “yet another cyberpunk story”. Confusing was that many things (persons, mostly) were the same as in our world, and you have to know at least a bit of British and American history to understand them; to understand who the persons are, what they did in our world, and why it is different (sometimes in a funny way) in that alternative world. If you don’t know them, they just stay one of many names in the story that really don’t matter, and because there are so many of them, it gets annoying. I don’t want to read a book with an encyclopaedia next to it to understand it (a few footnotes might have helped, especially in the translations, after all, what has a foreigner to offer on “common knowledge” when it gets to the historic details of any other country than his homeland?) The Difference Engine might be seen as a computer, a calculator, where “difference” is a mathematical word. But in this book, a Difference Engine might have been the machine that makes the difference between our world and that alternative world. The society, and this I found not very attractive, is not Victorian in the book - it’s American in my opinion. I very much missed the British accent in the book, hints to British humour, and a feeling for style and class - and a cup of tea during cricket. Having most of the book set in London, England, I would have expected some more on this. The characters are now like Americans after they raided Buckingham Palace and don’t know how to make proper use of the sterling silver teaspoons. The same goes for the Luddites that are put into the story: just your average hooligan looking for mayhem instead of a more intelligent political movement coming from a major social setback and social insecurity of the lower classes. The fun part are the steam(punk) gadgets in the story. There are a lot of them, ranging from racing cars to the dreaded police Engines that holds a database of everyone. Some are only for entertainment, some for daily use. The telegraph is used like the fax machine in the pre-email era. The clothes made by machines make an attractive alternative fashion. You can get many ideas from it how a steampunk world might function with these; even though it is explaining how our modern times could have been lived a hundred years ago, if only those gadgets had been made at the time. It’s a pity that the way they function isn’t always made clear, thus being little more than a placebo, a dummy in the background. © Yaghish 2003 |
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