Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: The Difference Engine as Alternative Victorian History

Abstract

n The Difference Engine (1991), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, two leading writers of cyberpunk,' leave the imagined near future, the Boston-Atlanta Sprawl and consensual hallucination of cyberspace in Gibson's Neuromancer as well as the global communications net of Sterling's Islands in the Net, to create an imagined near past in the sooty streets of London where Victorian savants2 debate evolutionary theory and where Charles Babbage's Analytical Engines, with their thousands of clockwork gears and yards of punched paper, have become the dominant technology of the time. Whatever our meta-narrative of Victorian life and culture, contemporary reconstruction of the nineteenth century is bound by certain limitations external to language. We may suspend our disbelief so as to imagine a passionate relationship between Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti, but such fictive events are set within a world in which the well-to-do ride the streets of London in horse-drawn vehicles, and Disraeli is for a time Prime Minister. A fiction in which the upper classes travel in steam-gurnies and Disraeli makes his living as a writer of florid prose moves into a genre of science fiction, into alternative history. Alternative history occupies a cusp between contemporary notions of the constructed nature of history and the demands of historicity. The narrative of the past is altered, but in distinction to fantasy or Wells's later alien invasion or time-travel plots, events within alternative