Steampunk

“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” exclaimed the British polymath Charles Babbage to his colleague John Herschel one day in 1821, as they worked together to correct a batch of mathematical tables riddled with errors. With that outburst, according to his memoirs, Babbage envisioned the first computer. The machine he conceived was colossal, a cogwheel behemoth comprising twenty-five thousand parts, planned to measure seven feet long and to weigh fifteen tons. The British government invested ￡17,500 in it—the cost of twenty-two new locomotives—yet after eleven years of hard labor Babbage’s unfinished difference engine was abandoned. But what if construction had succeeded? That’s the question sci-fi writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling asked a century and a half later, their answer serving as the premise of The Difference Engine, a novel in which the information age overtakes Victorian England. As a work of speculative fiction the book was a deep meditation on the interdependence of technology and society, destined to have an intellectual impact nearly as significant as Gibson’s breakthrough Neuromancer, in which he introduced the idea of cyberspace. Also like Neuromancer, arguably the first cyberpunk novel, The Difference Engine was to spawn a vast subculture. Steampunk, as the cult was dubbed, was actually named several years before The Difference Engine was published, in a 1987 letter to the genre magazine Locus, penned by the sci-fi writer K. W. Jeter. “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term,” he wrote. “Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.” James P. Blaylock, another writer of these “Victorian fantasies,” seconded Jeter’s suggestion in the following issue, and the subgenre was sufficiently established by the time The Difference Engine was published in 1990 that the Locus editors decreed it “ not steampunk, because it is a work of hard sf.”