Well, after reading the book I still don't feel like I had any answer to those questions. In fact, I don't really feel like this book had any cohesion at all. Essentially what we have here is three novellas, each with a different central character. But other than a mysterious box of punch cards which each of them at one time or another possesses, there isn't any throughline. There are tantalising bits of plot here and there, but none of it seems to go anywhere or make any sense. And the box of cards has no impact; everyone's out to get it, but why? Who knows what it does? Why should we care?

Characters appear and disappear with infuriating randomness -- just when you think something's going to happen, Oops! that's the end of that bit and no we're somewhere else. Conspiracies are hinted at but then they just vanish or become unimportant with no explanation. I kept waiting for all the threads to come together and knock me over the head with significance, but that never happened.

Some of the alternate reality stuff was interesting, but there just wasn't enough backstory to make it relevant. All in all, the book left me with the feeling of "What the heck was that about?" If the writers knew, I wish they had seen fit to share.


I wanted to love it.   January 10, 2003
 21 out of 25 found this review helpful

It was such a great premise for a book-- what if the Babbage had realized his analytical engine and successfully created computer much earlier in our history? It was also encouraging that two of my favorite writers were involved. Unfortunately, _The Difference Engine_ never really delivers on its astounding amount of promise and the resulting book, while readable, does not hold together terribly well.

Three sets of very different lives intersect when they all come in contact with a mysterious box of punch cards. Mix in an alternative history, lady Ada Babbage (with echos of Moorcock's Gloriana), and a staggering richness of detail and you have the book itself.

Unfortunately, it often felt like a huge amount of talent in search of a plot. The detailing was perfect, the characters were great, but the story just never came together.

Too bad.


Meat, not gruel   June 20, 2004
 17 out of 18 found this review helpful

I'm puzzled by the complaint (made by several reviewers below) that the plot threads are never tied up (yes they are, in the final third of the novel) and that we never find out what the mysterious punch cards do (we most certainly do -- see pp. 387, 421, and 429, where we're told EXACTLY what their function is).

This is admittedly a novel that has to be read carefully; one can't just slurp it down like jello without doing any work. It's a serious novel, thank goodness -- not "light entertainment."

I'm also puzzled that nobody seems to have noticed what a highly *political* novel this is. This book is much more about political and cultural ideology than it is about alternative-history technology.


Loathing....unadulturated loathing... ....I loathe it all!   July 15, 2006
 17 out of 18 found this review helpful

Recipe for an excellent book:
1 Very excellent author, whose grocery lists are probably high art.
1 Passing fair author who is clearly a devotee of the above.
1 excellent idea
1 scathing view of modern politics and the direction of culture
8 or more well developed characters

In a perfect world, you place these things in a blender and out pops a perfect book (Deus Irae by Dick and Zelanzny, for example.) In the chaotic universe, however, sometimes the ingredients just aren't enough.

In well-over twenty years of reading science fiction, spec and alternative history there, literally, has never been a book I found more appealing (before reading) than The Difference Engine. Co-authored by my favorite living author, firmly based in my own political views, discussing a time frame and technologies I enjoy reading about, I had every expectation of a read that would be enjoyable.

I am a forgiving reader who can be caught up in the art not the story, if the story fails (and this one does). Turn a phrase prettily and I will forgive a lack of plot in a heartbeat. Have a stirring plot and sanitized seventh-grade English and I will plow through just to see how it ends, even if I loathe your style. Have a plot that is one-dimensional, and writing that is more so, and I will freely admit to a deep hatred of your work (ahem. Mercedes Lackey, Orson Scott Card, ahem...) but I will *still* give you a chance on occasion (and hate myself for doing it.)

When I read The Difference Engine, I tried to imagine everything other than the book itself that would inspire such loathing in me. Did I have PMS? Did I not get it? Was I under stress? Sick? Unhappy at something else and projecting it onto this book?

I read it again. I have heard of people not getting Neuromancer and hating it, and figured maybe even though that concept was alien to me, I would get it if I read it again...

So I did. I read the characters with the flat affect of a dozen schizophrenics on Haldol and Thorazine and went "why are these characters this way? Is it part of the story? (No, just terrible writing.) I re-read the sex scene that went on for a couple of dozen pages with all the eroticism of a minimalist story about defecation and all the appeal of a 1950s VD movie flickering on an old 35mm projector. Ick! I read the fascinating plot and the fascinating world and realized I found it as interesting as belly button lint.... No, that's not appropriate. At least belly button lint you can wonder about!

The Difference Engine vacillates between a tour guide to a completely uninteresting alternate reality, sweaty soft-core porn that has the sex appeal of syphilis and the inner workings of characters that are, themselves, nothing but punch-cards in a world of PCs. They don't work, they don't tell you anything, and we just don't have the capacity to get much use out of them in our world.

I expect, someday in the future, we'll find out that the book was ten times longer and some terrible editor butchered it, and that's why it was so very sucktacular. At that time, I will go back to my previous view of Gibson as an author with the Midas touch.



Despite the richness of detail, the novel drags.   December 5, 1997
 14 out of 14 found this review helpful

An enviable array of critical raves lines the first few pages of The Difference Engine, including this one from director Ridley Scott: "A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail."

In this novel Gibson teams up with Bruce Sterling, a brilliant sci-fi writer himself, to provide an amazing picture of Victorian England. Both writers are notable for their attention to detail, and their combined effort teems with thousands of minutiae from the period, not to mention large themes based on the Victorian preoccupation with such things as science, technology, exploration, and steam.

The novel belongs to a particular genre of science fiction called alternate history, where the writer answers the question, if such-and-such had happened (or never happened), what would the world be like now? The Difference Engine tries to imagine what the world would be like if the computer had been invented 100 years earlier. It is set in England in 1855. Sci-fi pundits have dubbed the novel "steampunk" because those who control the steam-driven computers control society.

The structure of the novel falls into three discreet, self-contained units all concerned with a case full of rare and valuable computer cards. In the first part, Sybil Gerard, a fallen woman, inherits the cards from her boyfriend, who was murdered for them. In the long middle section Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a scientist famous for his discovery of the Brontosaurus, takes charge of them next. And in the conclusion Lawrence Oliphant, a gentleman detective with advanced syphillis, finally solves the mystery of their whereabouts.

Alternate history writers love to recast famous figures in altered roles. The writers have done just that with, for example, three of England's greatest romantic poets. Lord Byron has become prime minister, and Disraeli (the prime minister of the history books) a hack writer. Shelly is some sort of anarchist rebel and Keats has become a kinotropist, a specialist in a sort of gas-illuminated light show of computer designed images. Keats, also, seems to be the only one who knows what the cards signify.

Just to show how far the villains will go to get the computer cards and the power the cards represent, they devise a way to break down all of London's eco system as the city grinds to a halt and falls prey to looters, many of whom join the villains' rebellion: "The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth."

Despite the raves from critics and all the wonderful detail, the novel sometimes dragged for me. As a lover of Victorian England (my graduate specialization), I perhaps should have liked it more, but I found the villain and some of the main characters, including Mallory, uninteresting. I wasn't convinced that things were much different in Gibson's and Sterlings's reality even with the addition of the computer, a noisy, mechanical, affair. The characters might as well have been fighting over an Egyptian mummy for all the difference the computer made. And the long center section with the inevitable Gibson pitched battle (I'm betting my money that Gibson wrote the middle part and Sterling wrote the bookends) didn't thrill me.

Lawrence Oliphant's genteel manners and shrewd detective work make him a fascinating character. The novel might have been more satisfying if he'd been the hero all the way through instead of just the last 100 pages. The experimental conclusion with various bits and pieces from personal journals, letters, advertisements, recordings, and popular songs attempts to tie everything up. But one never has the sense that the cards nor the computers were as important as the writers want us to believe. Did the cards really contain just a mathematical gambling system, as everyone seemed to think, or were they something more ominous and earthshaking? Keats comments that they were far more important than anyone would ever know but doesn't say why. They simply are never satisfactorily explained.