Eli's Reviews > The Difference Engine

** spoiler alert ** A dense, dark book. Full of amazing ideas and richly realized settings and gadgets; whetted my appetite for steampunk. I know I missed a lot and might be willing to reread it at some point to pick up more.

But the plot is full of holes and jumps and places where the authors seem to have lost interest and wandered off into something else. Why spend the first 100 pages establishing Sybil as a major character and then send her away for the next 300? Why place so much emphasis on the French cards and then have them be not much of an issue? If Captain Swing and his anarchists (or were they communists? Not so well shown) were going to be such a big deal, why make them seem, in the lead-up to their "big scene" (and the scene itself) more like a pesky mosquito than a threat to national security? I didn't imagine they were supposed to be ominous until the book told me they were.

This may be partly because of my other gripe: uneven development of minor characters. The main ones were done well, but Lady Ada, who was only a passing fancy, was strongly drawn, where Captain Swing, who was supposed to be a menace, was a cartoonish charicature. And the ending! Whoa, the anticlimax that was the ending. We never even met Egremont, but we're supposed to care what he does? The Grand Napoleon is destroyed, and we learn it just in passing?

This isn't a bad book; it's just one that puts more emphasis on mood and setting and gadgetry than on plot and characterization. This a rare case where that feels like a conscious choice, not a fatal flaw.