The Difference Engine

William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

Bantam Books, 1991 - Fiction - 429 pages

A brilliantly inventive alternate history by the two biggest names in Cyberpunk, Gibson and Sterling, about a 19th century computer revolution arising from the invention of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine--a forerunner of today's computer based on mechanical principles rather than electronic technology.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mbmackay - LibraryThing

This book is even better than I had realised as I started reading it - I feel the need to go back and re-read it to fully appreciate it. The concept is an "alternative history" in which Babbage and ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - ragwaine - LibraryThing

My wife and I read 400 pages of this before we gave up on the last 30 pages. We kept hoping it would get better, that it would start making sense, but it never really did. Around page 300 there was a ...

About the author

William Gibson was born on March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina. He dropped out of high school and moved to Canada, where he eventually graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1977. He is the author of Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Peripheral, and Neuromancer, which won the Phillip K. Dick Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Johnny Mnemonic.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Difference Engine; A Bantam spectra book
• Authors: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling
• Contributor: Bruce Sterling
• Publisher: Bantam Books, 1991
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 7, 2008
• ISBN: 0553070282, 9780553070286
• Length: 429 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction