Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
My Shakespeare professor was ravishing: clever and ebullient, and never to be found without knee-high leather heels. I drew playbill covers while she lectured, and gave them to her at the end of class. One day I went to her office hours and there they were, all arrayed upon the wall above her desk. Life is the better for beautiful, passionate people.One day, at the end of class, she beckoned me over: "Are you going to turn your next paper in on time?"Of course, I answered, non-chalant, with a cr...
Did you read Neuromancer and say, "This was good, but it could have used more steampunk?" That's kind of how one might describe The Difference Engine: Neuromancer meets steampunk. It's not a comprehensive, completely accurate description, but if that's sufficient for you, you can stop reading now and go read the book.Still here? Cool.William Gibson is on my "I must read everything by him!" shelf, and his influence on literature, particularly science fiction and subgenres like cyberpunk and s...
This is based upon the idea that computers were invented much earlier in our history. How would that have changed things? This is a big absorbing read.
STEAMPUNK SALAD3 (5-ounce) cans solid Victorian Era packed in water1/2 cup minced Bruce Sterling1/2 cup minced William Gibson1/4 cup Technological Speculation1 hard-boiled Spy Thriller, chopped in large pieces1 soft-boiled Detective Tale, finely minced3 Major Characters, lukewarm1 Mysterious Box of Computer Punch CardsSalt and Pepper1/2 teaspoon AmbitionSTEP 1Place Victorian Era in fine-mesh strainer and press dry with paper towels. Transfer to medium bowl and mash with fork until finely flaked....
Finding the fun hidden within The Difference Engine requires a major archaeological expedition. First you must dig through a layer of Victorian British slang, followed by a layer of alternate-history jargon. Next, carefully remove a rocky patch of shifting perspectives and unclear motivations. After that, you will confront a bloated stratum of physical description so detailed and uninteresting you'll be tempted to rush through it, barely glancing at the muddy mixture as you shovel it out. I sugg...
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, two major SciFi powerhouses, joined forces to produce The Difference Engine, a classic steampunk novel which was nominated for the 1990 British Science Fiction Award, the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1992 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Prix Aurora Award. I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version which was produced in 2010 and read by the always-wonderful Simon Vance.The Difference Engine takes place in a
Ach, I wish I could recommend this book more highly, but I was very disappointed in it.Perhaps my expectations were too high, given how much I loved Gibson's "Neuromancer." However, "The Difference Engine" was over-long. The plot threaded together slowly. The character development of central characters was fragmentary and tended toward the superficial. The writing of the action scenes was unbelievably bad - the reader could barely piece together what was happening, and it almost made no sense. T...
I think I like the idea of steampunk better than its application.William Gibson collaborated on this 1990 novel with Bruce Sterling and I imagined while reading that Gibson added the pre-cyberpunk cool while Sterling contributed the alternate history depth. I have no idea if this is correct, just my hypothesis.When I think of steampunk I think about brass and gears and top hats and bulky aeronaut goggles. A cool look, but what’s it about?This one is about an alternate world where England has led...
Ok, so as far as I can tell, this book pretty much invented a lot of the steampunk trappings we take for granted. And the world-building is seriously awesome. There's some fascinating alt-history, lots of SCIENCE!, and mies and miles of clockwork computers running everything. The great horse races are replaced by mechanical guerneys, Japan makes wind up dolls out of whalebone, there's even a weird kind of digital animation. The whole thing is put together exceedingly cleverly. First rate world-b...
This book is pure brilliance. As all the other Gibson books I have read, the ending kind of.. dissolves into mist, leaving you with questions and giving you a lot of room to imagine and pursue ideas -this being a very positive thing, actually. I think Sterling's style gave Gibson a grounding tug, so the whole ending chapter is about closure, something Gibson doesn't always work well with, but this one made me go back and forth to refresh character, and I had wikipedia open to read the biographie...
I give this two stars because I quite enjoyed the first 50 pages or so. Then it was crap from there on out. (Well, I assume the rest was crap, as I only read another 50 pages of pointless drivel before deciding not to waste any more of my precious time.) It was odd. The first 50 pages formed a reasonably complete, self-contained, and satisfying short story. I don't think those pages were intended to be that way, but they were. Then another chapter started with totally different characters that h...
When I read Neuromancer, I started out not understanding a thing that was going on, but finally made sense of everything by the end. When reading The Difference Engine, I had the opposite experience. The first segment was fully comprehensible, but afterward the book just turned to mush. What in the world happened? Who were all these characters? What was the conflict and what was at stake? Don't ask me, because I haven't a clue. I got more and more irritated as I got closer to the end and had to
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 an...
The Difference Engine explores a world in which Charles Babbage built a practical mechanical computer in the mid-19th century. Britain is thus going through both the Industrial and Information Revolutions simultaneously. The book combines Sterling's wildman inventiveness with Gibson's brooding, streetwise characters, both shoved back one and a half centuries into an obsessively-detailed and weirdly-transmogrified London of 1855.Gibson and Sterling explore such topics as dinosaur physiology, Cata...
SF Masterworks (2010- series) #17: First published in the 1990 this book was one of the prime foundations of the steampunk movement, a movement that could have been that more improved if it went into the detail and scope of this book. An alternate history reality in which steam-driven Babbage Difference engines worked the way Babbage foresaw and hence the computing age occurs in the early 19th Century and the writers get into so much detail of the effect on the world and more so on the British E...
I have absolutely no idea how to rate this book. Parts of it are fast-paced and great. And parts are really slow and some are plain boring. Since I am not quite sure and I want to be fair, I'll leave it somewhere in the middle. I did kind of like it, after all. The book is divided into five parts (iterations) and it takes place in a very dark XIX century London. Everything that happens to the characters in this story somehow ends up connected to a wooden box full of punched Engine cards, but not...
As many others have pointed out, this book is one of the first in what we now know as the Steampunk genre. It explores the question of what would happen if the Industrial Revolution and the development of the computer had coincided—what would Victorian society have looked like? It’s a complex novel, with a lot of layers. I read most of it in airports and on planes and didn’t have the best circumstances to be able to concentrate on those details. On the other hand, if it had been really riveting,...
Yuck yuck yuck. Bad action, bad dialogue, bad characters. The worst of all, though: the world was wonderfully designed, but the plot was so meaningless and boring. What a waste of a grand environment to set such a terrible story.Some collaborations combine the strengths of all involved into something extraordinary. Others magnify the weaknesses. This is a fine example of the latter.PS: the ending is the greatest WTF in modern history.
Sometimes it *really* pays to re-read a book.I wasn't very impressed when I first read this book. My favorite character at the time vanished with about forty pages left, and I didn't find the end compelling.I can't remember when I first read the book, but it was years ago. Now that I'm older and have both read more and experienced more, I feel I got a lot more out of the book. I actually found Laurence Oliphant's struggle with his beliefs more compelling than Edward Mallory's accidental heroics....
Well, the world-building is quite interesting, though apparently all the female characters in this alternate Steampunk England are whores or math geniuses, with the occasional murderess thrown in for good measure. Every other social or political movement gets accelerated or represented but not the Suffragists, amazingly enough. Apart from that, many of the secondary characters are way more interesting than the protagonist. The plot is a ramble-fest through the world-building and requires a fair