Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Difference Engine

This is the book that apparently started the whole steam-punk genre, and I can kind of see why steam-punk is so popular.

"The Difference Engine" has a fascinating premise: What if the computer age had happened roughly 100 years before it actually did? Part alternate-history sci-fi and part cyberpunk set in the Victorian era, "The Difference Engine" is a fascinating glimpse at a weird alternate universe that bares more resemblance to the 21st century than I think most of us would care to admit.

In the world of this book, England is one of the world's greatest Superpowers (it has created and perfected the world's largest and most powerful super-computer) along with France, as the North American continent is a hotbed of unrest and constant warring between the separate countries of the American Union, the Confederacy, Texas, and California.

Japan is slowly breaking out of its isolationist shell to become another superpower, allied with England. Meanwhile, underground Luddite (anti-technology) insurrectionists plan to destroy English society, which they feel has become a moral cesspool because of everyone's reliance on technology and information.

Interesting, too, that co-authors Bruce Sterling and William Gibson published this novel in the early '90s, long before the Internet had a chokehold on the world. I'm not a total Luddite (and I'm sure Sterling and Gibson aren't either), but their depiction of a world that appears to be falling apart at the seams (thanks in no small way to a technology that was probably intended to make life easier and better) is frighteningly prophetic.