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Sites about The Difference Engine
by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling.
An alternate history, ‘steampunk’ novel in which the computer age is ushered in 100 years earlier in Victorian England with the building of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.
Keywords: cyberpunk, steampunk, alternate history, science fiction, computers
Critical sites about The Difference Engine
- Gibson and Sterling’s Alternative History: The Difference Engine as Radical Rewriting of Disraeli’s Sybil
- http://node9.phil3.uni-freiburg.de/1997/Kraus.html
- “This essay will trace the methods through which Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), a social novel asserting that the evils of the industrial revolution and the concomitant barbarousness of workers and employers can only be redeemed by the humanistic values of the enlightened landowning aristocracy, is transformed into The Difference Engine, with a scientific meritocracy that holds up information as the standard of value, and that asserts a technoculture in which the human and the mechanical easily merge. Catastrophism and chaos theory, positing ‘prigoginic leaps’ to ‘a new, more differentiated, higher level of ‘order’ or organization,’ offer a more positive outlook than Disraeli’s uniformitarian stance in Sybil.”
- Contains: Content Analysis, Historical Context
- Author: Elisabeth Kraus
- From: Node9 Volume 1, 1997
- Keywords:
Other (non-critical) sites about The Difference Engine
- The Difference Dictionary
- http://www.sff.net/people/gunn/dd/
- Dictionary for and commentary on William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine. Browsable and searchable.
- Author: Eileen Gunn
- Author: Eileen Gunn
- Keywords:
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The Difference Engine on the About network:
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Last Updated Apr 29, 2013