The Difference Engine

The Difference Engine

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Language	English
Genre	Alternate history, steampunk
Publisher	Victor Gollancz Ltd
Publication date	September 1990
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	383 pp (Paperback – 429 pages)
ISBN
OCLC	21299781

The Difference Engine (1990) is an alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk.

It posits a Victorian Britain in which great technological and social change has occurred after entrepreneurial inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in his ambition to build a mechanical computer (actually his analytical engine rather than the difference engine).

The novel was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in 1990, the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991, and both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prix Aurora Award in 1992.

The novel is chiefly set in 1855. The historical background diverges from our timeline around 1824, when Charles Babbage succeeded in creating his Difference Engine and went on to develop the Analytical Engine. He became politically powerful and at the 1830 general election opposed the Tory Government of the Duke of Wellington. Wellington staged a coup d'état in 1830 in an attempt to overturn his defeat and prevent the acceleration of technological change and social upheaval, but was assassinated in 1831. So the Industrial Radical Party, led by a Lord Byron who had not died in the Greek War of Independence, came to power. The Tory Party and hereditary peerage were eclipsed. British trade unions assisted the ascendancy of the Industrial Radical Party (much as they aided the Labour Party of Great Britain in the twentieth century in our own world). As a result, Luddite anti-technological working class revolutionaries were ruthlessly suppressed.