Discover Top Posts Tagged with #the difference engine

Time Travel Question 60: 19th Century III and Earlier

If you could travel through time, but only to see something for research or fun, not to change anything, what would you pick? (Yes you may have a babel fish in your ear to translate).

A dinner party with Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson.

What was Vincent VanGogh's orientation?

A quiet family dinner at Shibden with Miss Lister and Miss Walker.

The Princesse de Sagan's bal des bêtes in Paris in 1885

The Philippine Revolution

Edgar Allen Poe's last day and true cause of death

The truth about Kasper Hauser's childhood.

The fate of the Grunwald Swords

An evening with Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud before Rimbaud stopped writing.

Athens 1896: The First Modern Olympic Games

The Difference Engine

The Year without a Summer, assorted vistas (1816)

Voting ended onSep 10, 2024

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William Gibson must be so fucking done, he's spawned two genres, one (cyberpunk) that has been co-opted by the very systems of he was putting on blast, and the other (steampunk) turned into a quirky and unserious little subculture with the occasional foray into satire

Both are divorced from their original themes by orders of magnitude.

If it was just Neuromancer I'd call it "right place right time" but The Difference Engine in 1991? Just as we were getting widely networked computers in layman hands? Insane, this man had his finger on the pulse and brought his full intelligence and imagination to bear.

Truly the man who launched 1000 micro genres

(shout-out Bruce Stirling who Co wrote the book that Launched Steampunk, but this isn't about you)

#william gibson #steampunk #cyberpunk #neuromancer #the difference engine #bruce sterling #buntalk #bun reads

i have three (3) tragic women from history that i think everyone ought to know more about and they are, in no particular order, louise augustine gleizes (a hysterical patient in 1800s paris), alice kober (got heart-wrenchingly close to cracking linear b in post-war new york), and ada lovelace (world’s first computer programmer)

i’ve cried over all of them at different points and i just think they’re fantastic and deserve more recognition. my book list (if anyone’s interested in learning more about them!) follows thus: Medical Muses (asti hustvedt), The Riddle of the Labyrinth (margalit fox), and The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (sydney padua). they all come with citations and they’re all FABULOUS. cannot recommend any of them enough!

(these ladies are also all inspiration for different ideas for musicals but that’s besides the point lol)

#augustine #louise augustine gleizes #alice kober #ada lovelace #linear b #la salpêtrière #hysteria #the difference engine #book recs #book list #book recommendations

In The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling combine their efforts to produce a darkly disturbing ‘alternate history’ of the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling describe Victorian England, with a twist: Charles Babbage’s difference engine, the first computer, is immensely more powerful and pervasive than it was in our real time line. Gibson and Sterling take the repressed, disciplined society which first invented the Panopticon, and give it massive computing power. The result is, as one might expect, horrifying. Citizens are given numbers and ID cards (rather as they are in many actual contemporary societies), and the Victorian government maintains vast stores of computerized data on all of its subjects. A good example of this computerized Victorian disciplinary regime is the Quantitative Criminology section of the Central Statistics Bureau: ‘The QC section was a honeycomb of tiny partitions, the neck-high walls riddled with asbestos-lined cubbyholes. Gloved and aproned clerks sat neatly at their slanted desks, examining and manipulating punch-cards with a variety of specialized clacker’s devices.’ Surely this vision of well-disciplined workers in a vast, cubicle-riddled office building is quite familiar to any citizen of the West in the late twentieth century. But somehow it becomes more sinister when Gibson and Sterling project it back into the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling perform the admirable service of making the carceral society that we take for granted into something slightly strange, and in so doing they increase its susceptibility to analysis and critique.

Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lexington, 2002), pp. 135–6.

#lewis call #postmodern anarchism #william gibson #bruce sterling #the difference engine #steampunk

Started reading The Difference Engine.

It’s good. Really good. Which, yeah, understandable, it invented the genre. But so far it’s not even cliche in the Anne McCaffery way, where you’re like “ugh, this is hitting all the beats of bad feminist SFF... wait... there’s a reason for that”.

I’m enjoying it but it’s so fast-paced I keep having to put it down because I can’t fully pay attention to what’s happening right now.

When will my meds return from the war.

#the earl speaks #the earl grumbles #the earl gets twitchy #the earl reads #the difference engine

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.

William Gibson

Victorian filmmaking (clackers)

one thousand pixels, one at a time

it took us more than 150 years to finally get here.... rejoice

#filmmaking #the difference engine #victorian era

The King stood, yanked the documents down, cast them onto his padded floor. ‘You see, sir, it don’t really matter a hang what nonsense is blithered and babbled on these bills! The secret truth is, that bills is endless by their very nature, regular as the tides in the Thames, or the smoke of London. London’s true sons call London ‘The Smoke’, you know. She’s an eternal city, like your Jerusalem, or Rome, or, some would say, Satan’s Pandaenonium! You don’t see the King of the Bill-Stickers worrying for smoky London, do you? Not a bit of it!’

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

#the difference engine #william gibson #bruce sterling #1990 #1990s #20th century #american literature #queue pierce my soul