| The Difference Engine | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 20/02/07 | 15:34 |
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page 2 of 4 Think about it: a British Empire at the zenith of its power, with an economy and industrial base backed by computers. Computerised record keeping, tracking of cash, of people, of goods and services. Nineteenth century credit cards. Automation on a post-WW2 scale. A military able to take advantage of computerised range-finding and battlefield logistics. A working-class empowered by free media, cheap goods, and technical limits on government corruption. Gibson and Sterling thought about it. Long and hard. Then, it's obvious, the pair engaged in a massive and detailed research phase. They constructed an alternate history, one that understands the industrialisation of computers would have a significant and fundamental effect on the direction of British history in the mid 19th Century. Forget Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative Party - the England of The Difference Engine is ruled by the Industrial Radicals. The House of Lords is full of men who win the position by merit - the merit-lordship. Men who play a significant role in the furthering of science are known as Savants. Agnosticism is the state "religion". The authors collected a bunch of contemporary historical figures and tried to imagine how The Difference Engine would have affected their fates. Disraeli, for instance, is a tabloid writer and publisher. John Keats is a kinotropist, a kind of steam-powered cinema director. Karl Marx is the popular hero of the New York Commune, while Engels runs the Manchester factory of his father's textile firm with gusto. Percy Shelley is a dangerous luddite revolutionary. Lord Byron is Prime Minister and leader of the Industrial Radical Party. Instead of being killed in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, he lasts until 1855, eventually expiring toward the end of the social crisis that grips Britain in the middle of the novel. And Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, is blown up by terrorists and posthumously vilified by the Industrical Radicals. In other words, this novel gives you, the student of 19th Century British history, plenty of food for thought, and plenty of wry smiles as you encounter familiar figures thrown into intriguing new situations by the particulars of Gibson and Sterling's alternate universe. As an alternate history, The Difference Engine has few peers. It's impeccably detailed, not just in terms of a hundred years of history, but down to the brands of commonly available products. Even more so, Gibson and Sterling have bothered to research what it means, socially, to buy a particular brand of tea tray, what the unexpectedly rich working- and middle-class have in their sitting rooms, and the preferred beverages of people at different social stations. You get the sense, as you plough through this relatively chunky book, that there's a whole universe waiting to be explored, the possibility of a whole series of books written in and around the England of the Industrial Radicals, an England that sent money and food and workers to Ireland to save the Irish from the potato famine, thus cementing Ireland's undying loyalty to King and Empire. An England that has a rock solid alliance with France, an Imperial France ruled by Napoleon III and his English Wife. |
