The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Witness the second little fruit of my resolution to review every book I read this year! It’s also evidence of my current Steampunk kick.
The Difference Engine is a poster-child of Steampunk, and Steampunk is a visually rich sub-genre. Anime and film capture, for example, the armored, steam-powered vehicles with their puffing and chugging, all-a-clacking with gears and pistons a la Miyazaki Hayao (Laputa, Nausica?§), The City of the Lost Children, or Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The comic medium does a great job with the juxtaposition of Victorian finery and industrial dystopia as well (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a great example). It’s a visually rich subgenre, and The Difference Engine is an album of verbal photographs set in a noiresque thriller. It captures the spirit of steampunk well in all of its sooty, rusty, riveted glory.
The world of The Difference Engine can be thought of as a historical freethinker’s wet dream. Lord Byron is prime minister, having successfully championed a meritocratic revolution that pushes science, rationalism and industry to the forefront. Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley are all members of the House of Lords and Ada Lovelace (the world’s first programmer) is the darling of this early information revolution powered by house-sized difference engines and littered with stacks of punch cards. In some ways, The Difference Engine is a big experimental playground in which the authors could drop their favorite authors and scientists into government and see what kind of society it produced.
That said, The Difference Engine is true to the ‘-punk’ aspect. It is dystopic and gritty, in contrast with the positivist and high-mindedness (if all too Anglo- and male-centric) of most of its Victorian characters.
I was a little disappointed with the MacGuffinish character of the main object of attention in the story, but all in all, it was a good read. I recommend it to any fans of William Gibson and to anyone who gets excited at the mention of Jacquard looms, Babbage engines and kinetoscopes.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Seraphine // Jan 23, 2007 at 12:33 am
Nice review. It’s been awhile since I’ve read this book; from what I vaguely remember, I remember liking it, but I remember like other Gibson books better.
2 Anima Umbrae // Jan 23, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I hope you get an email alerting you to my entry on this now outdated post. We’ll see.
I think I’ve made a similar resolution. I want to engage in a structured analysis of and a careful reflection on the books I read–whether anybody else reads my book reviews or not.
I’ve read Gibson before. Having done the obligatory *Neuromancer* thing and followed that up with *Virtual Light*, I felt relieved of the obligation to read anything else by that particular author. I felt like his works were somewhat overlong with overly convoluted plots which had little personal connection to the protagonists. I had essentially written Gibson off as tragically hip; a neophile whose writing is rather tiresome after the novelty wears off. Yet he’s probably one of those authors whose work I can’t afford to ignore.
Any and all steampunk work intrigues me, though, so perhaps I’ll give this book a shot. Your comments about the MacGuffin-driven plot resonate with my previous experience of William Gibson’s writing, but the idea of all those prominent characters tossed together into one story can’t help but be intriguing, not unlike *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* (I think I am the only person in the world who liked that movie, but how can you hate a movie where Mina Harker and Captain Nemo and Dr. Jekyll fight Dorian Gray and Professor Moriarty?). Steampunk intrigues me because of its anything-goes fusion of science and magic, history and fantasy. It is probably one of my favorite subgenres of literature and film and video games, rivaled only by post-apocalyptic fiction, which is exactly opposite in its stripped-down, strictly delimited starkness. In any case, if you come across any good steampunk books, be sure to let me know.
3 Miko // Jan 23, 2007 at 2:18 pm
sounds kinda like Diamond Age, by Neil Gaiman…he prolly copied Gibson on that, too :-p
4 John // Jan 24, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Diamond Age is on my list, though I think it’s by Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon fame).
Anima, I’m finding your Gibson assessment apt. I’m on my third attempt to get through Neuromancer, though I really liked his ideas and prose in Pattern Recognition (which I’m not sure qualifies as Cyberpunk or even Science Fiction). It had a McGuffin in it as well.
I held off on the TLoEG movie because I didn’t want it to spoil my experience of the graphic novels. I’m in the middle of a China Mieville novel right now–I’ll keep you posted.
5 Miko // Jan 25, 2007 at 9:25 pm
according to a magazine I read today on one of Disney’s soundstages (I don’t remember the name, so I’m not linking to it), George Cloony is making a miniseries of Diamond Age to be broadcast on the SciFi channel…I can’t wait!!!
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