Japan has its own revolution in the early 1850s, transforms overnight into a technological society, and acquires her own Engine (even the Meiji Revolution still took almost 3 decades in Real Life).Alternate History Wank: Although the Engines and associated steam technologies needed a stronger version of the then nascent British industry to work, the history of the rest of the world is accelerated as through magic, with subtle hints at the 20th century developments:.He mentions getting into scrapes with Native Americans while searching for dinosaur bones.
Adventurer Archaeologist: Mallory is a Gentleman Adventurer Archaeologist.
Is a Crapshoot: The very last lines of the book reveal that the narrator has been an AI that just achieved sentience. Linking all their stories is the trail of a mysterious set of reportedly very powerful camphorated cellulose computer punch cards and the individuals fighting to obtain them as is the case with special objects in several novels by Gibson, the punch cards are to some extent a MacGuffin. The story follows Sybil Gerard, a political courtesan and daughter of an executed Luddite leader (she is borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil) Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a paleontologist and explorer who comes into a lot of money thanks to a good bet on an advanced steam gurney model and Laurence Oliphant, a historical figure with a real career, as portrayed in the book, as a travel writer whose work was a cover for espionage activities "undertaken in the service of Her Majesty". Among the many various changes that arise as a result of this innovation are an even more powerful British Empire, a Divided States of America, an early Communist Revolution in Manhattan led by Karl Marx himself, steam-powered gurneys (this timeline's equivalent of cars), and the premature invention of "camphorated cellulose" (aka celluloid - the first thermoplastic). 1855 in which a great wave of 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 titular Difference Engine). It is a prime example of the steampunk sub-genre, often considered the Genre Popularizer. The Difference Engine is a 1990 alternate history novel written collaboratively by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
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