| The Difference Engine | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 20/02/07 | 15:34 |
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page 4 of 4 Still, things are just starting to get interesting. There's lots of gunplay, cool characters, action, awesome dialogue: As chaos rose, Mallory kicked the empty chair before him into skidding flight, and yanked both pistols from his belt.
"Sit down you bastards!" He levelled his pistols at the audience. "I'll blow daylight through the first coward that stirs!" His answer was a fusillade of shots. "Run!" Brian screeched. He, Tom and Fraser fled at once. And then, suddenly, it all stops. The second novella has finished, and we're on to the third. This once is a sort of brief detective story, where a character introduced earlier, Laurance Oliphant seeks something. Maybe the cards. Maybe Sybil Gerard. It's really, really hard to tell. Part-time journalist, full time spy for various elements within the British Government. He leads us on a chase for... well ultimately the stack of punch-cards. This third novella makes the least sense. Oliphant wanders back and forth across London, takes rubber baths to relieve "railway spine", dines with the Japanese, and eventually tracks down Sybil Gerard in France. He asks her about the punch-cards, she says she knows nothing about them except they were run through a French Engine and more or less broke it. And then that novella ends too, and you're left with a collection of short paragraphs which, among other things, reveal that the punch-cards were a program written by Ada Lovelace that demonstrated Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems - which in real life weren't figured out until 1931. I have no compunction telling you this because you'll only glean it from the novel if you're a student of mathematics. Like the circumstances of Charles Babbage's real Difference Engine, this book is an example of brilliance let down by the mundane restrictions of real life. Designing and meticulously researching a detailed alternate history based on mechanical computers came apparently easy to Gibson and Sterling, but actually writing a decent novel eluded them. One assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that the book just took too long. A project that dragged and dragged, while both authors pursued their glittering solo careers. This was the late 80s and early 90s remember, when the "cyberpunks" were cool, and spent as much time hanging around parties dressed in black leather jackets as they did writing. Will we ever understand the circumstances of the writing of The Difference Engine? What this universe deserves is not one book, but a series, each built perhaps around a different mathematical principle prematurely discovered by these steam-powered PCs. But as Frank Herbert's Dune so admirably demonstrates, sometimes a brilliant universe let down by a so-so story, or limited by the gap in an author's ability between being about to think about an idea and actually translate that idea into the experiences of a bunch of characters, is what makes a novel. The Difference Engine can still be enjoyed. Just don't expect a cogent, A-to-B narrative. Don't expect to grasp all the concepts first go (unless you have indeed been studying information theory, pure maths, and 19th Century English social history). Read it with Wikipedia in close reach. Don't be afraid to look things up. Consider this a novel that gives you a taste, a slice, a glimpse of the way the world could have been, had computers been developed 150 years earlier. classic
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