An enviable array of critical raves lines the first few pages of The Difference Engine, including this one from director Ridley Scott: "A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail."

In this novel Gibson teams up with Bruce Sterling, a brilliant sci-fi writer himself, to provide an amazing picture of Victorian England. Both writers are notable for their attention to detail, and their combined effort teems with thousands of minutiae from the period, not to mention large themes based on the Victorian preoccupation with such things as science, technology, exploration, and steam.

The novel belongs to a particular genre of science fiction called alternate history, where the writer answers the question, if such-and-such had happened (or never happened), what would the world be like now? The Difference Engine tries to imagine what the world would be like if the computer had been invented 100 years earlier. It is set in England in 1855. Sci-fi pundits have dubbed the novel "steampunk" because those who control the steam-driven computers control society.

The structure of the novel falls into three discreet, self-contained units all concerned with a case full of rare and valuable computer cards. In the first part, Sybil Gerard, a fallen woman, inherits the cards from her boyfriend, who was murdered for them. In the long middle section Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a scientist famous for his discovery of the Brontosaurus, takes charge of them next. And in the conclusion Lawrence Oliphant, a gentleman detective with advanced syphillis, finally solves the mystery of their whereabouts.

Alternate history writers love to recast famous figures in altered roles. The writers have done just that with, for example, three of England's greatest romantic poets. Lord Byron has become prime minister, and Disraeli (the prime minister of the history books) a hack writer. Shelly is some sort of anarchist rebel and Keats has become a kinotropist, a specialist in a sort of gas-illuminated light show of computer designed images. Keats, also, seems to be the only one who knows what the cards signify.

Just to show how far the villains will go to get the computer cards and the power the cards represent, they devise a way to break down all of London's eco system as the city grinds to a halt and falls prey to looters, many of whom join the villains' rebellion: "The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth."

Despite the raves from critics and all the wonderful detail, the novel sometimes dragged for me. As a lover of Victorian England (my graduate specialization), I perhaps should have liked it more, but I found the villain and some of the main characters, including Mallory, uninteresting. I wasn't convinced that things were much different in Gibson's and Sterlings's reality even with the addition of the computer, a noisy, mechanical, affair. The characters might as well have been fighting over an Egyptian mummy for all the difference the computer made. And the long center section with the inevitable Gibson pitched battle (I'm betting my money that Gibson wrote the middle part and Sterling wrote the bookends) didn't thrill me.

Lawrence Oliphant's genteel manners and shrewd detective work make him a fascinating character. The novel might have been more satisfying if he'd been the hero all the way through instead of just the last 100 pages. The experimental conclusion with various bits and pieces from personal journals, letters, advertisements, recordings, and popular songs attempts to tie everything up. But one never has the sense that the cards nor the computers were as important as the writers want us to believe. Did the cards really contain just a mathematical gambling system, as everyone seemed to think, or were they something more ominous and earthshaking? Keats comments that they were far more important than anyone would ever know but doesn't say why. They simply are never satisfactorily explained.

As several previous reviewers have commented extensively on the plot(or lack thereof), I will not go into detail on that. As a serious fan of both Gibson and to a lesser extent Stirling, when I heard about the colloboration on this novel I had very high hopes. Initially I was very dissappointed, the novel really seemed to drag, and the plot seemed to disappear in overwhelming detail, then I reached the far too brief section ending the first iteration and was just blown away by the sudden feeling that all of this actually had meaning. The less narrative sections at the ends of each iteration gave me enough encouragement to finish the novel, particularly the rather enjoyable one at the end after the nominal storyline is concluded. After I finished it I found myself suffieciently fascinated by the world and to a lesser extent the characters that I immediately reread the book and came away feeling satisfied that it had been worth the effort.

This is not a masterpiece when viewed purely as a novel but its real value lies in an exceptionally precise and detailed evocation of a Victorian Era that could have been, and the subtle parallels to our own situation. In the effects of the computer revolution on the Victorian Era we see reflections in a dark mirror of the effects on our own era, specific applicability is not certain but I liked the way that the perspectives from later times scattered throughout the book, particularly in the final section give hints of ways that our own society might go.

In a final note some of the historical variations, Keats as a Hacker, Byron as the Prime Minister and others too numerous to mention are quite entertaining and sometimes enlightening, I particularly liked the way that it is strongly suggested that ones career is more a matter of chance than commonly thought.

If you are willing to spend the time this novel is well worth reading, but be warned that it is often slow moving. It is emphatically not a page burner and is best appreciated with time to ponder its subtleties.

Indeed, this is the first of an unfortunately limited genre. Gibson and Sterling do a very entertaining and informative job of showing us the Victorian era's industrial mastery. The story, unfortunately, comes unraveled a bit. Nonetheless, the prose is engaging and the story premise quite brilliant. It focuses on the question of "what would have happened if computation had been successfully realized in a mechanical medium first?" This is an excellent premise for philosophical and historical speculation. It forces us to focus on the prejudices we tend to uphold regarding electronic computation. Those prejudices are nicely bent by this book. Moreover, it serves as a nice little history lesson about the true origins of computers and the very first programming language, which just happens to have actually been partially developed by Lady Ada Byron, Lord Byron's (the poet) wife and mathematical prodigy in her own right.

I would love to read more works in this genre. Recently, there has been a renewal of interest surrounding the accomplishments of the Victorian era, and we should all keep in mind the spirit of possibility emodied by the Victorians. This is a good book to read in conjunction with Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_, which I will also review.