William Gibson - The Difference Engine

Gibson and Sterling tackle their Dickensian dystopia with verve and aplomb, lifting current issues into a vastly different social and ethical matrix. Their gaslight-and-computers world is both plausible and eerie.

L OS A NGELES D AILY N EWS

Smartly plotted, wonderfully crafted, and written with sly literary wit spins marvelously and runs like a dream.

E NTERTAINMENT W EEKLY

Offers many pleasures for the reader to unpack and examine. Highly readable as an alternate-historical romp, it moves in its closing chapters to a brooding meditation upon history and consciousness, and hints at a further level of significance that the reader will be some time in pondering.

N EW Y ORK N EWSDAY

Enormously entertaining.

T HE B OSTON P HOENIX

Demands a second reading that Im in the midst ofand enjoying.

S AN D IEGO T RIBUNE

Intelligent with a light touch [a] mixture of real and imagined history, worked up into a ripping adventure yarn.

L OS A NGELES T IMES

[A] tour-de-force adventure the book resembles Babbages marvelous machines: the story spins on gears and uncoils like springs.

P HILADELPHIA I NQUIRER

A peculiar and fascinating twist to history a fascinating historical treasure hunt follows the cyberpunk tradition.

S AN J OSE M ERCURY N EWS

An alternate 19th century where the computer revolution has arrived early to create a hybrid society, half modern, half traditional, where Victorians must cope with the effects of future shock a few generations early ingeniously designed and depicted.

L OCUS

A crackling-good spy story. Its a joy to find a book in which the words shine as brightly as the premise.

S EATTLE T IMES

Splendidly extraordinary. It is stimulating to have ones intelligence overestimated by such brilliant writers.

T HE S UNDAY T IMES (L ONDON )

An erudite but snappy Victorian techno-thriller.

G LAMOUR

A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail.

R IDLEY S COTT , director of Blade Runner and Black Rain

I read it with great pleasure. Theres a Victorian-like love of science and technology in the air these days, and an information-driven revolution in human affairs in progress. Gibson and Sterling show how deep the revolution will be by mapping it wittily and realistically onto a known past.

S TEWART B RAND , creator of The Whole Earth Catalog

Books by William Gibson

NEUROMANCER
COUNT ZERO
MONA LISA OVERDRIVE
BURNING CHROME
VIRTUAL LIGHT
IDORU
ALL TOMORROWS PARTIES
PATTERN RECOGNITION
SPOOK COUNTRY

Books by Bruce Sterling
INVOLUTION OCEAN
THE ARTIFICIAL KID
SCHISMATRIX
ISLANDS IN THE NET
CRYSTAL EXPRESS
MIRRORSHADES (ed.)
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
GLOBALHEAD
HEAVY WEATHER
HOLY FIRE
DISTRACTION
A GOOD OLD-FASHION FUTURE
ZEITGEIST
THE ZENITH ANGLE
KIOSK
THE CARYATIDS

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE
A BANTAM SPECTRA BOOK

Bantam hardcover edition published April 1991
Bantam paperback edition/February 1992

SPECTR A and the portrayal of a boxed s are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1991 by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
Map designed by G D S J Jeffrey L. Ward.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER : 904276.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: BANTAM BOOKS.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80127-2

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Tradmark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, Inc., New York, New York.

v3.1

C OMPOSITE IMAGE , OPTICALLY encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.

A villa, a garden, a balcony.

Erase the balconys wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chairs wheel-spokes.

The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.

These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.

Her name is Sybil Gerard.

Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.

Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible gracemetal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.

Like starlings, Sybil thinks.

The airships lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.

Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.

She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about hertill, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her fathers hanging falls

And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another bywayone where it is always evening.

It is January 15, 1855.

A room in Grands Hotel, Piccadilly.

One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the doors cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a womans fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a mans checked trousers and cutaway coat.

Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron grip of winter Big Ben bellowed ten oclock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath of London.

Sybil slid her feet through icy linens to the warmth of the ceramic bottle in its wrap of flannel. Her toes brushed his shin. The touch seemed to start him from deep deliberation. That was how he was, this Dandy Mick Radley.

Shed met Mick Radley at Laurents Dancing Academy, down Windmill Street. Now that she knew him, he seemed more the sort for Kellners in Leicester Square, or even the Portland Rooms. He was always thinking, scheming, muttering over something in his head. Clever, clever. It worried her. And Mrs. Winterhalter wouldnt have approved, for the handling of political gentlemen required delicacy and discretion, qualities Mrs. Winterhalter believed she herself had a-plenty, while crediting none to her girls.