The Difference Engine

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

The novel posits a Victorian England in which the Industrial Radical party, led by a longer-lived (because he never joined the Greek War of Independence) 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 and Sterling'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.

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; and a Communist commune in Manhattan. Among other historical characters, the novel features Texan President Sam Houston, as an exile after a political coup in Texas, a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley, as a Luddite, and the utmost respect for Charles Darwin is expressed in the society.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

During the story, many characters come to believe that the aforementioned set of special punch cards are a gambling "modus," a program that would, theoretically, always allow the user to place reliable bets. This is in line with Ada Lovelace's penchant for gambling (in both the novel and actuality). Only in the last chapter is it revealed that the punched cards represent a program which, when run, will prove two theorems which in reality would not be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Gödel.

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