The Difference Engine - Setting

Setting

The novel is chiefly set in 1855. The historical background diverges from reality around 1824, when it is imagined that Charles Babbage succeeded with his Difference Engine and went on to develop the Analytical Engine. He became politically powerful and at the 1830 general election opposed the Tory Government of the Duke of Wellington. Wellington staged a coup d'etat in 1830 in an attempt to overturn his defeat and prevent the acceleration of technological change and social upheaval, but was assassinated in 1831. So the Industrial Radical Party, led by a Lord Byron who had not died in the Greek War of Independence, came to power. The Tory Party and hereditary peerage were eclipsed. British trade unions assisted the ascendancy of the Industrial Radical Party (much as they aided the Labour Party of Great Britain in the twentieth century in our own world). As a result, Luddite anti-technological working class revolutionaries were ruthlessly suppressed.

By 1855 the Babbage computers have become mass-produced and ubiquitous, and their use emulates the innovations which actually occurred during our information technology and Internet revolutions. Other steam powered technologies have also developed, so, for example, Gurney steam carriages are an increasingly common sight. The novel explores the social consequences of an information technology revolution in the nineteenth century, such as the emergence of "clackers" (a reference to hackers), technologically proficient people, such as Théophile Gautier, who are skilled at programming the Engines through the use of punch-cards.

In the novel, the British Empire is more powerful than in reality, thanks to the development and use of extremely advanced steam driven technology in industry. In addition, similar military technology has enhanced the capabilities of the armed forces (airships, dreadnoughts, and artillery); and the Babbage computers themselves. Under the Industrial Radical Party, Britain shows the utmost respect for leading scientific and industrial figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Darwin. Indeed, they are collectively called "savants" and often raised to the peerage on their merits, causing a break with the past as regards social prestige and class distinction. These new patterns are also reflected in the educational sphere: classical studies have lost importance compared to more practical concerns such as engineering and accountancy.

Britain, rather than the United States, opened Japan to Western trade, in part because the United States became fragmented, due to interference from a Britain which foresaw the implications of a unified United States on the world stage. Counterpart successor states to our world's United States include: a (truncated) United States; the Confederate States of America; the Republic of Texas; the Republic of California; a Communist Manhattan Island commune (with Karl Marx as a leading light); British North America (analogous to Canada, albeit slightly larger in this world); Russian America (Alaska); and terra nullius. Napoleon III's French Empire holds an entente with the British and Napoleon is even married to a British woman. In the world of The Difference Engine, it occupies Mexico. Like Great Britain, it has its own analytical/difference engines (ordinateurs), especially used in the context of domestic surveillance within its police force and intelligence agencies. As for the other world powers, Germany remains fragmented, with no suggestion that Prussia will eventually form the core of a unified nation as it did in our own world in 1871, which may be due to French sabotage analogous to that pursued in the case of the fragmentation of the United States noted above. As noted above, Japan is awakening after the British ended its isolation, and looks set to become one of this world's leading industrial and economic powers from the twentieth century onward, as in our world. Due to Lords Byron and Babbage's intervention, the Irish potato famine never occurred, and as a result there is no mention of agitation for Irish home rule or Irish independence.

Among other historical characters, the novel features "Texian" President Sam Houston, as an exile after a political coup in Texas, a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley (as a Luddite), John Keats as a kinotropist (an operator of mechanical pixelated screens), and Benjamin Disraeli as a publicist and tabloid writer.