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3.0 

The Difference Engine

By William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines.  Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time.  And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future:
 
Sybil Gerard—a fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator
 
Edward “Leviathan” Mallory—explorer and paleontologist
 
Laurence Oliphant—diplomat, mystic, and spy.
 
Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose.  Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for….
 
Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine is the collaborative masterpiece by two of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today.  Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, it is a startling extension of Gibson’s and Sterling’s unique visions—and the beginning of movement we know today as “steampunk!”

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157 Reviews

3.0
Expressionless Face“DNF AT ~10% school reading. it was so dense I couldn't get through it before either had move on to the next novel. Want to try again eventually”
Slightly Smiling Face“An alternative history of a world where Charles Babbage saw the wide application of his Difference Engine and the construction of his Analytical Engine, and a Radical Party made up of scientists, industrialists and entrepreneuers ended both Whiggs and Tories, and the old blood nobility in Great Britain. The plot revolves around a mysterious set of punctured cards that were supposedly written by Lady Ada Byron, Prime Minister Lord Byron's daughter, who is the object of a cult of personality. The plot is incidental, and the novel focuses on the lives and events around a set of three characters whose trajectories are intercepted by the cards: a londoner prostitute, daughter of one of the old executed ludites, a paleontologist who trafficked weapons to native americans in a very different Texas War, and a master-spy who carries a public identity of a diplomat and a travelsman. The worldbuilding is very well done, and the novels engages in the theme of techonologic advances and societal changes that the Cyberpunk works of both authors also delved into.”

About William Gibson

William Gibson is credited with having coined the term "cyberspace" and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. He is the author of NeuromancerCount Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.  

Bruce Sterling is an Austin-born science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist who is also considered one of the forefathers of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. He has won a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award.

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