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《The Difference Engine/差分机》作者：[美]William Gibson/威廉·吉布森【完结】

内容简介：

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. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future:

Sybil Gerard —a fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator

Edward “Leviathan” Mallory —explorer and paleontologist

Laurence Oliphant —diplomat, mystic, and spy.

Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for….

Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine is the collaborative masterpiece by two of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, it is a startling extension of Gibson’s and Sterling’s unique visions—and the beginning of movement we know today as “steampunk!”

From the Paperback edition.

Praise for

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE

“Gibson and Sterling tackle their Dickensian dystopia with verve and aplomb, lifting current issues into a vastly different social and ethical matrix. Their gaslight-and-computers world is both plausible and eerie.”

—LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

“Smartly plotted, wonderfully crafted, and written with sly literary wit … spins marvelously and runs like a dream.”

—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“Offers many pleasures for the reader to unpack and examine. Highly readable as an alternate-historical romp, it moves in its closing chapters to a brooding meditation upon history and consciousness, and hints at a further level of significance that the reader will be some time in pondering.”

—NEW YORK NEWSDAY

“Enormously entertaining.”

—THE BOSTON PHOENIX

“Demands a second reading that I’m in the midst of—and enjoying.”

—SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE

“Intelligent … with a light touch … [a] mixture of real and imagined history, worked up into a ripping adventure yarn.”

—LOS ANGELES TIMES

“[A] tour-de-force adventure … The book resembles Babbage’s marvelous machines: the story spins on gears and uncoils like springs.”

—THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“A peculiar and fascinating twist to history … a fascinating historical treasure hunt … follows the cyberpunk tradition.”

—SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

“An alternate nineteenth century where the computer revolution has arrived early to create a hybrid society, half modern, half traditional, where Victorians must cope with the effects of future shock a few generations early … ingeniously designed and depicted.”

—LOCUS

“A crackling-good spy story … It’s a joy to find a book in which the words shine as brightly as the premise.”

—THE SEATTLE TIMES

“Splendidly extraordinary … It is stimulating to have one’s intelligence overestimated by such brilliant writers.”

—THE SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON)

“An erudite but snappy Victorian techno-thriller.”

—GLAMOUR

“A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail.”

—RIDLEY SCOTT, director of Blade Runner and Black Rain

“I read it with great pleasure. There’s a Victorian-like love of science and technology in the air these days, and an information-driven revolution in human affairs in progress. Gibson and Sterling show how deep the revolution will be by mapping it wittily and realistically onto a known past.”

—STEWART BRAND, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog

BY WILLIAM GIBSON

Zero History

Spook Country

Pattern Recognition

Neuromancer

Idoru

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Count Zero

Burning Chrome

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Johhny Mnemonic:

The Screenplay

The Difference Engine

(WITH BRUCE STERLING)

Virtual Light

BY BRUCE STERLING

Involution Ocean

The Artificial Kid

Schismatrix

Islands in the Net

The Difference Engine

(WITH WILLIAM GIBSON)

Heavy Weather

Holy Fire

Distraction

Zeitgeist

The Zenith Angle

The Caryatids

The Difference Engine is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

2011 Spectra Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1990, 2011 by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Introduction Copyright © 2011 by Cory Doctorow

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Gollanz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, in 1990 and subsequently in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1991 in slightly different form.

eISBN: 978-0-345-53258-9

www.ballantinebooks.com

Cover design: David Stevenson

Cover illustrations: © Arthur Johnson (steampunk eye)

and © Richard Nagy (Babbage Clacker detail)

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by Cory Doctorow

Map

First Iteration: The Angel of Goliad

Second Iteration: Derby Day

Third Iteration: Dark-Lanterns

Fourth Iteration: Seven Curses

Fifth Iteration: The All-Seeing Eye

Modus: The Images Tabled

Afterword

About the Authors

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE

A GENERATION LATER

by Cory Doctorow

The greatest irony of The Difference Engine is that it’s easily the most prescient novel from either Bruce Sterling or William Gibson, both authors with a reputation for successful futuristic prediction. Of course, both writers disavow any capacity for prognostication—Gibson happily and famously admits to practicing “presentism,” not futurism; that is, using the literary device of the future to tell stories about the present.

It’s true that Gibson and Sterling have inspired plenty of futuristic effort; Sterling’s environmental/design manifestos influenced a generation of tinkerers and designers; Gibson’s matrix fired the imaginations of plenty of 3-D virtual world creators, Web developers, and other network makers. But inspiration isn’t the same as prediction: When Nokia engineers paid homage to the Star Trek communicator with their flip-phone designs, it wasn’t because Gene Roddenberry foresaw a true vision for the future of mobile communications. It was because telcoms geeks watched Star Trek.

Today, there is a thriving steampunk subculture—costumed and bewigged, energetically publishing zines (even print ones) and creating all manner of clockwork-encrusted ephemera and tchotchkes. They gather in large numbers for conferences. They argue about what is and isn’t “real steampunk.” There are steampunk club nights that host steampunk bands.

There are steampunk sex toys. (Is there steampunk porn? Actually, not as of this writing; I’m guessing it’ll be landing on a search engine near you any day now.)

The most interesting thing about modern steampunk (you should forgive the expression) vis-à-vis Sterling-Gibson prescience is that practically none of it was inspired by The Difference Engine. The average steampunk at the events I attend seems to be in her or his midtwenties, about the same age as this book. The Difference Engine was not a time bomb, waiting to be discovered by an identity-hungry generation twenty some years after it first saw print.

No, The Difference Engine did not inspire steampunk, but it surely did predict it.

The thing is, being a steampunk is weird. It’s even weirder than being a science fiction fan (not merely someone who reads science fiction, but someone who identifies with the science fiction subculture—someone who’d live in the science fiction quarter if his city had such a thing).

It’s weird enough that finding other potential steampunks—or even discovering that steampunk exists and having that frisson of these are my people—is a serious challenge.

Or at least, it was a serious challenge, twenty-five years ago, before Google made all that subcultural stuff as easy as a search term. There’s the real prescience in Gibson and Sterling’s work of the day: At the time when AT&T was boldly predicting that the Internet would come along and make us all more normal (“Have you ever tucked in your daughter from three thousand miles away? You will.”), these guys were promising that it would make us weirder than ever. It would make it possible for the happy mutants lurking among us to discover one another across the miles and the years, and to industriously trade elaborate leather-and-brass garments, improbable prop ray guns, and entire Burning Man–loads of goggles.

Why has steampunk caught fire now, in the midst of the networked society, ten years into the relentless WTO era of global trade? I think the answer is in the motto of the excellent Steampunk Magazine: “Love the machine, hate the factory.”

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him. An artisan carpenter might have gone outside to sand lumber on a fine spring day when the air was blossom scented and stayed inside to varnish on a freezing day when the stove’s heat defied the elements. But a factory worker can’t choose her tasks or their timing: that is dictated by all the intricate interdependencies with which she is enmeshed. The factory might produce the same door at one-thousandths the price, but at a brutal and incalculably high human cost.

At its root, steampunk venerates the artisan, celebrates an abundance of technology, and still damns the factory that destroyed the former’s livelihood to create the latter. Contemporary steampunk subculture inhabits a contrafactual world in which these contradictions are resolved—where “the street finds its own use for things” and where makers can produce wonderments that simultaneously embody light-speed technological change and enduring artisanship (if there was ever a gewgaw that illustrated this perfectly, it is the brass-worked steampunk USB thumb-drive, doomed to be obsolete in a year, but handwrought to survive for the ages).

The funny thing is, we might just get there. The combination of 3-D printers (and other rapid, local fabrication devices) and a network stuffed with HOWTOs explaining how to accomplish 90 percent of any project (you come up with the remaining 10 percent and publish your results, of course) puts an artisanal, bespoke high-tech practice in reach of everyone who loves the machine and hates the factory and wishes you could have one without the other.

After all, this is the age of collaboration, an era in which it is simpler to work together than ever before. Consider that Bill and Bruce wrote this book by FedExing floppy disks to each other, from Vancouver to Austin and back again, augmented by long, thoughtful faxes debating what should happen next, and compare this to the process by which writers today collaborate. Charlie Stross and I are writing a novel together by loading text into version control systems that instantaneously collate and track all the changes either of us makes.

So here we are, a quarter century after that heroic age when FedExed floppies twined together the words of two of the great thinkers of our time, producing this fabulous brick of prose you hold today. A book that prefigured not only a subculture, but a “prosestyle,” the Google-style-of-literature that involves a fiendish density of quirky historical references and oddly vivid details from the most obscure corners of yesteryear and literature—but, incredibly, this wealth of fascinating bits and bobs and paste bombs was harvested by hand from the University of Texas at Austin library without so much as a search engine. Do keep that in mind as you go, visiting this text for the first time perhaps, or revisiting it now after twenty years—today, a hack like me might Google up a scattering of fanciful Victorian argot for verisimilitude, but these fine gentlemen got their stuff the hard way, the artisanal way, the *steampunk* way.

Bravo, sirs.

THE ANGEL OF GOLIAD

Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.

A villa, a garden, a balcony.

Erase the balcony’s wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair’s wheel-spokes.

The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.

These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.

Her name is Sybil Gerard.

Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.

Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace—metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon.

Like starlings, Sybil thinks.

The airship’s lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.

Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory.

She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her—till, by the walls on Newgate, the shadow of her father’s hanging falls …

And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway—one where it is always evening….

It is January 15, 1855.

A room in Grand’s Hotel, Piccadilly.

One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door’s cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman’s fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man’s checked trousers and cutaway coat.

Two forms lay beneath the bedclothes of the laminated-maple four-poster, and off in the iron grip of winter Big Ben bellowed ten o’clock, great hoarse calliope sounds, the coal-fired breath of London.