I Read Books: The Diference Engine
This alternate Victorian Age novel by two cyberpunk authors is the one that (by a roundabout route) gave the genre of Steampunk its name. How does it stand up?
At the heart of it is an adventure story with Edward Mallory, discoverer of the Brontosaurus, finding himself caught up in a plot to do with a set of punchcards with an advanced algorithm, and then an insurrection breaks out in 1855 London during the Great Stink, a terrible smog. Around it is Sybil Gerard (from Disraeli’s novel Sybil; Disraeli himself makes a cameo as Mallory’s ghostwriter) a political courtesan who finds herself involved with the exiled Texan President Sam Huston and her beau Dandy Mick who had the cards made. And trying to make sense of it all is the (alternately) historical travel writer and spy Laurence Oliphant, who juggles these problems, the rising power of a witch-hunting politician and visiting Japanese diplomats.
The novel is split into sections called iterations, based on an algorithm that spirals in to see what it finds at the end of the novel.
It doesn’t quite coalesce into a coherent whole, but on the other hand that’s not what the early cyberpunk novels were about either (short fiction was otherwise). Even Neuromancer – a heist to jailbreak a pair of artificial intelligences – isn’t quite straightforward. The novel revels in the Victoriana, the steam gurneys, the squalor and the palaces, the clothes and the social classes, and most of all the words and slang, they absolutely love weird 19th century slang. So if Steampunk turned out more about top hats and goggles with cogs on rather than about social upheaval and the philosophical questions of self-awareness, well that part was there from the start.
Read This: For a gritty, visceral Victorian adventure
Don’t Read This: If you’d rather know what the actual plot is rather than have steam gurney races, sweaty sex while London is falling into chaos and exciting gun fights
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