| The Difference Engine | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 20/02/07 | 15:34 |
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page 3 of 4 But The Difference Engine is all you get, one book. And here's the real problem. Because while this is one of the best, most detailed, truest alternate histories you'll ever read, as an actual novel it's a complete mess. To say there is no story would be a merciful simplification of the tangled web of characters and events you, the reader, are expected to pick your way through. Essentially, this book is a short novella, a long novella, and a short story, all bound together. And then, right at the end, are a bunch of disconnected paragraphs giving the briefest of snapshots of this fascinating world. The action opens in 1905, with a woman named Sybil Gerard remembering the past. Two hundred words later, we snap back to 1855, where we follow Sybil's adventures with a man named Mick, servant to the exiled President of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston. Houston is desperate to get his Republic back from the Mexicans and is stirring up support in England. We get to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of London, encounter a few more historical figures such as John Keats, but 74 pages later Sybil's story is more or less over. Violently. Her fate is left dangling. The fate of a stack of mysterious Jacquard cards - used to program the eponymous Engine - is left dangling. But someone, somewhere must end up claiming them and passing them on, or perhaps there is more than one copy, because next we know we're at Epsom, about to witness a race between a bunch of steam-powered "gurneys" (read: cars). One of them has this marvellous new Engine-calculated thing they called "line-streaming". The book does a lot of this: take a modern concept identified by two words, and reverse the words. After the third time it gets a bit irritating. The focus of the novel now is Edward Mallory, an archaeologist who is basically a British version of Indiana Jones. He spends most of his time traipsing across the wild untamed hinterland of Northern America, supported by a Steam Fortress and shooting native Americans left and right. He's famous in England for having discovered the Land Leviathan, the fossilised remains of a beast he called a Brontosaurus, which his Engine-calculated research suggests was warm-blooded and could stand up on its hind legs to eat the tops of trees. In other words, his vision of a dinosaur is roughly 150 years in advance of real 19th Century thinking. All thanks to the mechanical computers. Mallory runs into the Queen of Engines, Ada Lovelace, daughter of British PM Lord Byron. She's being hassled by unpleasant people, and in the ensuing fisticuffs (Mallory is definitely the stuff British gentlemen are made of), Mallory ends up with a box full of mysterious punch cards. Before he can do much about returning them to Ada Lovelace, Mallory gets mixed up in The Stink, a social crisis that grips London. As really happened in the 1950s, London's air gets caught under an Inversion Layer, and all the nasty pollution that was being pumped high into the air ends up on the street. Cue anarchy and an attempt at a communist revolution. Unfortunately, not only are the leaders of the revolution acting pretty damn cynically, the British military can bombard any given location with pin-point accuracy, thanks to Engine-programmed artillery. Game over. |
