**The 20th anniversary edition of the classic steampunk novel
With new commentary by the authors
**
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. Great Britain, with the benefit of this new technology, prepares to better the world. In London, fierce summer heat and pollution have driven out the ruling class, and ensuing anarchy allows the subversive, technology-hating Luddites to surface and battle the intellectual elite, in a race toward a rendezvous with history, and the future…
Much of the problem centers on a set of perforated Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose, once in the possession of an executed Luddite leader’s daughter, later in the hands of Queen of Engines Ada Byron (daughter of prime minister Lord Byron), finally given to Edward Leviathan Mallory, explorer and paleontologist scientist. Mallory, who knows the cards are a gambling device that can be read with a specialized Engine, is soon threatened and libeled by the Luddites, and he and his associates confront the scoundrels in a violent showdown over a box of punched cards someone wants badly enough to kill for.
A collaborative novel, part detective story, part historical thriller, from the premier cyberpunk authors, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine takes us not forward but back, to an imagined 1885.
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