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William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's
The Difference Engine (1991) starts with an intriguing idea: it rewrites
Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, an industrial novel about the reconciliation
of the classes, as a historical fantasy that traces the roots of today's
information society back to nineteenth-century England. The authors, best
known as the pioneers of cyberpunk science fiction, take Babbage's invention
of a computing machine in 1822 as warrant for imagining the advent of the
computer age a century before its time. Their novel presents the nineteenth
century as a full-blown information order, complete with massive databases
on citizens, surveillance apparatus, photo-IDs, credit cards, rapid international
data transmission via telegraph, and scientific societies that serve as
unofficial intelligence arms of the military. So persuasive has their historical
conceit been that it has spawned a sub-genre of science fiction known as
"steam-punk," which includes Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth (1992),
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age(1995), and George Foy's The
Shift (1996).
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Gibson and Sterling's novel is fun—at
least in places. It is amusing to read of John Keats, consumptive former
medical student, as a pioneer of the silent cinema; of Reverend Wordsworth
and Professor Coleridge, leaders of a thriving Pantisocratic community in
America; of Lord Byron, Prime Minister of England, and of his daughter,
Lady Ada Byron, Queen of a loose confederacy of hackers, called "clackers,"
because of the sound made by the mechanical parts in their steam-driven
computers. The variations on Disraeli's novel are clever as well. Sybil
Gerard, the idealistic daughter of a Chartist agitator, does not marry her
aristocratic suitor Charles Egremont but is seduced and abandoned by that
ambitious politician; she becomes the lover of a minor character from Disraeli's
novel, Mick Radley, who here is involved in international espionage and
computer software theft. Events in Disraeli's novel, both large and small,
are effectively transmogrified for the contemporary plot. The riot at Mowbray
Castle in Sybil, for example, becomes a vast Luddite uprising in
London in the later novel, and offhand references to horse racing in the
first two chapters of Disraeli inspire a key episode at the races, this
time of steam-powered gurneys. The latter incident provides Gibson and
Sterling with a vivid way of introducing to the story Ada Byron's gambling
and laudanum habits, which are based on historical sources.
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In the few years since its publication, The
Difference Engine has garnered some remarkable praise from sources as
diverse as Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner, Stewart Brand,
creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, and scholars writing in ANQ
and Victorian Studies. The effusive praise and serious critical attention
that the novel has received largely glosses over the book's pervasive misogyny
and its long middle section that glorifies the violent exploits of Mallory
in what amounts to a conventional science fiction shoot-em-up. The story
follows the violent plot form of the techno-thriller, a genre that relegates
women to sexual appendages of the hero or to threatened objects of technological
stalkers and government conspiracies. These elements present challenges
for the teacher, for students are often so taken with the fast pace of the
narrative that they overlook what seem to me to be serious drawbacks with
the novel.
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The most valuable use for The
Difference Engine in the classes I have taught has been to highlight
questions of the status of history and periodization in the formation of
knowledge. The most serious claim for the importance of The Difference
Engine lies in its postmodern approach to history. Gibson and Sterling's
fictional transformation of the past accords well with postmodern arguments
about the constructed nature of all historical knowledge, which allows one
to engage this interesting topic (regardless of one's view of the merits
of the postmodern position). The vivid alternative world the novel creates
brings to life the theoretical issues behind the historical enterprise,
issues that often seem abstract and unrelated to the interests of undergraduates
in the Romantics classroom.
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