Paulo's Reviews > The Difference Engine

This book is a dystopian-cyber-steampunk-alternative history novel....huffff!

Writer Bruce Bethke coined the term Cyberpunk in 1983 with his short story of the same name, while the term steampunk was coined by author K.W. Jeter in 1987
Dystopian and alternative history are more well-known sub-genres whose authors of their origins are harder to identify and much more disputable anyway.

Bruce Sterling is generally acknowledged as one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, along with William Gibson and others. Gibson and Sterling collaborated on this alternate history novel, which became recognized as an important work of the subgenre known as steampunk.

Cyberpunk and Steampunk are subgenres of the science fiction branch of literature. Cyberpunk is usually set in a dystopian futuristic background that tends to focus on a combination of lowlife and high tech, while Steampunk incorporates retro-futuristic technology and aesthetics inspired by, but not limited to, 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.

At the core of this book are Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, real people in 19th-century England and both among the greatest intelligence in the scientific world.
Charles Babbage is generally considered the father of computers, with his Difference Engine and the subsequent Analytical Engine he took the first steps to invent the practical computers we know today. He even brushed in the AI theory. The rest could be resumed to the history of adapting new materials and techniques to the same principle ending with today, where everybody has in their pockets a mini-computer thousand times more powerful than the one on board Apolo XI, used to go to the moon.
Ada Lovelace (daughter of the poet Byron) was an English mathematician, known for her work on Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation and she developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.
According to the historian of computing and Babbage specialist Doron Swade, Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world, his engines were bound by numbers. What Lovelace saw was that numbers could represent entities other than quantity and that transition was made explicitly by Ada in her 1843 paper on the subject.



This alternate world was born as a result of a particular invention that had significant political, economic, and sociological implications: the computer. The book is particularly interesting because it speculates on the possible consequences of the computer's creation, making it an intriguing read. However, this aspect of the book is mostly hidden in the background, suffocated by the threads and details of the characters' day-to-day lives, which are most of the time uninteresting and insignificant in the larger context hinted at the plot.

The authors have employed a combination of real-life personalities and fictional characters in their work. The setting of the story features Britain as the leading global power with Manhattan being a communist island governed by Karl Marx. The Prime Minister in this alternate world is Lord Byron, who also leads the Radical Party known as Rads.

What troubled me in this book is the fact that if a reader gets into it without any previous knowledge about any historical facts of the 19th century (especially England) then this can be a very hard experience. And even if I can appreciate the intellectual effort behind it, The novel failed to captivate my attention and left me feeling indifferent towards the characters. I was unable to form any meaningful emotional connection with them, which made the reading experience dull and unfulfilling.

Disappointed... Very