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Title: The Difference Engine
Author: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Genre: Steampunk
Thingummies: 3 (5 for world-building, 1 for PISSING ME THE HELL OFF)
Synopsis: In one of the first steampunk novels (written in 1991), the founder of cyberpunk suckers you in with the promise of an adventure novel, and then repeatedly slips into experimental fiction for no good reason. More usefully, in Victorian London, Lady Ada and Charles Babbage ushered in the computer age a century early. A whore with a heart of something, a paleontologist who wants to grow up to be in a Clive Cussler book, and a spy who really should have been used better sort of go haring off after a MacGuffin that never really justifies its existence. Entire book ends in a whimper, that made me whimper. Utter waste of a fascinating premise that ends up feeling like the authors invited you over to movie night, you walked in, and then they wanked off in your face.
Thoughts: Ok, so as far as I can tell, this book pretty much invented a lot of the steampunk trappings we take for granted. And the world-building is seriously awesome. There's some fascinating alt-history, lots of SCIENCE!, and mies and miles of clockwork computers running everything. The great horse races are replaced by mechanical guerneys, Japan makes wind up dolls out of whalebone, there's even a weird kind of digital animation. The whole thing is put together exceedingly cleverly. First rate world-building at its very best.
But then, aaaarrrrrrrgh. (Yes, this is a very technical reviewer's term.) I think I'm actually going to have to list the things that PISSED ME OFF, quite a bit, really.
Spoilers sown in liberally, but given that the authors themselves are the worst destroyers of tension, it won't ruin the book too much for you. Here there be rantings.
1. Characterization. Ok, this is really more just personal preference than legitimate gripe. The tone and characterization had a cold feel that I hesitate to dub "masculine", especially after the beauty of the first two male-authored books I read this year. But it feels like a "guy" book. The style reminds me of classic 1950s science fiction, or modern day action spy novels. No one really elicits your sympathy. Characters do not converse so much as pontificate. The main character has manly weaknesses, such as being too rash, that do him no real harm in the long run. Very Marty Stu. It's all about the world and the plot and not really about the people at all. Well, that's not ideal, but not really a hanging offense--plenty of people seem to prefer this style, it's just not my cup of tea.
2. Sexism. Here's where my blood first started to boil.
Ok, so the deeply problematic structure, which I'll address in a moment, strongly favors the paleontology Mallory. Most of the book is from his perspective. Mallory is a fairly typical Victorian technocrat, with some opinions about women and non-Europeans that are fairly typical for his time. For example, he has a conversation about the backwardness of the Japanese where it is clear that the authors think he has his head stuck up his ass and will ultimately be proven wrong. Fine. It's historically accurate. He has a similar conversation about women and how no matter how smart they are, they really are useless without a man.
Thing is, from the way women are portrayed in this book, the authors believe that one.
There are only a handful of women who appear at all. Surprisingly, it actually passes the Bechdel test--near the beginning, two whores have an extended conversation about politics, paleontology, and singing, along with the discussion of their clients. But well, they're basically all whores.
And I don't really mean women who have taken control of their sexuality and enjoy sex. No, I mean women who sleep with a lot of men, without seeming to enjoy it at all, mostly for gain, and are looked down upon by the authors for doing it.
We have one of the ostensible main characters, a whore named Sybil who inadvertantly starts off the plot by following the instructions of her new client and then promptly disappears, reappearing to have turned out to have been helped by another man by being married to a third man who died before she met him. She calls herself an adventuress, but despite a brief period where it looks like she might get some autonomy, is ultimately helpless without a man and kind of pathetic even so. And a whore.
Then there are some minor female characters. Sybil's roommate Hattie, who's also a whore, and has some of the least erotic sex with Mallory I've ever read. Basically, the very extended scene seems to exist to remind us that men have urges they need to assuage, even if women are kind of disgusting. There's also a whore Mallory had sex with in Canada he thinks might have been diseased, and a Native American woman he slept with on a dig who he remembers with contempt as having slept with all the other men, too. There's an actress, who might as well be a whore. And there's Mallory's sister, who's totally a virgin. This is important because when someone tries to ruin Mallory's life, they send her fiance a letter saying she's a slut. At least she's not a whore, though.
And then there's Lady Ada. Whom the world worships as the Queen of Engines, and whom Mallory desperately tries to help. She's brilliant and beautiful and her father Lord Byron is Prime Minister, and she spends all her time with the royal family. And the plot hinges on a box of punch cards that came into her posession. Oh, look, it's a smart and useful female character who might be awesome, since everyone says she's awesome, right?
Well, no. Because it turns out she's a drug-addled, gambling addicted, hopelessly foolish slut who is coasting on a brief flowering of mathematical ability in her twenties that she's never repeated. And she totally sleeps around. That whore. It's embarrassing, really.
3. Structure. So remember how much trouble I had pinpointing who the main character is? Well, the structure of this book is ridiculous. I think the idea was that it was three linked novellas and an appendix a la Tolkein. Only, while each novella comes to a conclusion, none of the conclusions are particularly satisfying.
The first section features Sybil the whore, and lasts 71 pages. The most important thing she herself does is send a telegram. It ends with a murder for mysterious reasons.
Next section is Mallory the paleontologist, for 249 pages, none of them involving Sybil whatsoever. It vaguely mentions the incident that caps off her section, but not as anything important. He acquires Lady Ada's punch cards and hides them. Then has about a hundred pages of adventures with people trying to find the cards, which end without them finding the cards or him ever finding out what was with the cards. He also briefly meets Oliphant the spy, who promptly disappears. Suddenly, it's twenty years later and he dies of a stroke. Whoops!
The third section is Oliphant, and lasts for 72 pages. Sybil and Mallory are each mentioned in passing, but aren't particularly important. The murder is solved in a completely anticlimatic way that has no bearing on the plot. The cards are found and their purpose discovered, in a completely anticlimatic way that has no bearing on the plot. The telegram was apparently the thing that is important to resolving the new major problem that crops up. Only Oliphant gets syphilis in a paragraph near the end for no apparent reason and so disappears. The Very Important Message is delivered by a minor character who's barely appeared before, and the section ends before the addressee actually reads the message. So no resolution whatsoever.
The last section is a series of snippets--press clippings, songs, etc. It contains the pretty much unnecessary world-building and denounement that the authors couldn't be bothered to work into the book. But they came up with it, so you have to read it now. It's 32 pages in which they answer none of the questions you want answered but fill out the details of things they gave you enough hints to work out on your own. Useless.
Also, at the beginning and ends of chapters, they switch into present tense for no good reason. The bulk of each chapter is in past tense.
4. Endings, or lack thereof Each section? Progressively more pretentious and experimental. Sybil merely has her path diverge forever from the one interesting person she encountered. Mallory dies. Oliphant's section, on the other hand, suddenly devolves into blank verse for no apparent reason at all. You're in an adventure/political novel, and suddenly it's experimental fiction! Who knew? So really, it shouldn't surprise you that the same thing happens at the end of the errata. Bullshit callback to Mallory's death, a bad pun on some mystical nonsense they threw in that never made sense, and the final line of the novel is an exclamation point centered in the middle of the page, all by itself.
What.
5. Mystical nonsense they threw in that never made sense. So 99% of this book is alt-history. If Babbage had succeeded in building his difference engine, possibly all of these events could have happened. Physics and chemistry seem to work the way they should, mysticism is ridiculed, it's all backwards science fiction.
So why, on the last page of Mallory's section, does he suddenly discover Cthuloid beasties which are never mentioned again?
Also, Oliphant seems to be followed by an All-Seeing Eye that I can't figure out. It might be a metaphorical reference to the Illuminati or something. Or it could be a literal occult eye that he thinks is following him around. Not clear.
So basically, they wrote a cold but brilliant steampunk adventure novel with a problematic structure. But then, that seemed too much like selling out. After all, neatly tying up the plot threads you laid out in a satisfying way that justifies the amount of effort the characters went to following them is so hackneyed. Instead, throwing in mystical mumbo jumbo and replacing the actual climax with a few lines of incoherent, pretentious poetry is so much deeper.
And if you don't like it, well, it wasn't for you. You're just not deep enough to appreciate it. Go back to your Asimov and stop whining.
Whore.
Author: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Genre: Steampunk
Thingummies: 3 (5 for world-building, 1 for PISSING ME THE HELL OFF)
Synopsis: In one of the first steampunk novels (written in 1991), the founder of cyberpunk suckers you in with the promise of an adventure novel, and then repeatedly slips into experimental fiction for no good reason. More usefully, in Victorian London, Lady Ada and Charles Babbage ushered in the computer age a century early. A whore with a heart of something, a paleontologist who wants to grow up to be in a Clive Cussler book, and a spy who really should have been used better sort of go haring off after a MacGuffin that never really justifies its existence. Entire book ends in a whimper, that made me whimper. Utter waste of a fascinating premise that ends up feeling like the authors invited you over to movie night, you walked in, and then they wanked off in your face.
Thoughts: Ok, so as far as I can tell, this book pretty much invented a lot of the steampunk trappings we take for granted. And the world-building is seriously awesome. There's some fascinating alt-history, lots of SCIENCE!, and mies and miles of clockwork computers running everything. The great horse races are replaced by mechanical guerneys, Japan makes wind up dolls out of whalebone, there's even a weird kind of digital animation. The whole thing is put together exceedingly cleverly. First rate world-building at its very best.
But then, aaaarrrrrrrgh. (Yes, this is a very technical reviewer's term.) I think I'm actually going to have to list the things that PISSED ME OFF, quite a bit, really.
Spoilers sown in liberally, but given that the authors themselves are the worst destroyers of tension, it won't ruin the book too much for you. Here there be rantings.
1. Characterization. Ok, this is really more just personal preference than legitimate gripe. The tone and characterization had a cold feel that I hesitate to dub "masculine", especially after the beauty of the first two male-authored books I read this year. But it feels like a "guy" book. The style reminds me of classic 1950s science fiction, or modern day action spy novels. No one really elicits your sympathy. Characters do not converse so much as pontificate. The main character has manly weaknesses, such as being too rash, that do him no real harm in the long run. Very Marty Stu. It's all about the world and the plot and not really about the people at all. Well, that's not ideal, but not really a hanging offense--plenty of people seem to prefer this style, it's just not my cup of tea.
2. Sexism. Here's where my blood first started to boil.
Ok, so the deeply problematic structure, which I'll address in a moment, strongly favors the paleontology Mallory. Most of the book is from his perspective. Mallory is a fairly typical Victorian technocrat, with some opinions about women and non-Europeans that are fairly typical for his time. For example, he has a conversation about the backwardness of the Japanese where it is clear that the authors think he has his head stuck up his ass and will ultimately be proven wrong. Fine. It's historically accurate. He has a similar conversation about women and how no matter how smart they are, they really are useless without a man.
Thing is, from the way women are portrayed in this book, the authors believe that one.
There are only a handful of women who appear at all. Surprisingly, it actually passes the Bechdel test--near the beginning, two whores have an extended conversation about politics, paleontology, and singing, along with the discussion of their clients. But well, they're basically all whores.
And I don't really mean women who have taken control of their sexuality and enjoy sex. No, I mean women who sleep with a lot of men, without seeming to enjoy it at all, mostly for gain, and are looked down upon by the authors for doing it.
We have one of the ostensible main characters, a whore named Sybil who inadvertantly starts off the plot by following the instructions of her new client and then promptly disappears, reappearing to have turned out to have been helped by another man by being married to a third man who died before she met him. She calls herself an adventuress, but despite a brief period where it looks like she might get some autonomy, is ultimately helpless without a man and kind of pathetic even so. And a whore.
Then there are some minor female characters. Sybil's roommate Hattie, who's also a whore, and has some of the least erotic sex with Mallory I've ever read. Basically, the very extended scene seems to exist to remind us that men have urges they need to assuage, even if women are kind of disgusting. There's also a whore Mallory had sex with in Canada he thinks might have been diseased, and a Native American woman he slept with on a dig who he remembers with contempt as having slept with all the other men, too. There's an actress, who might as well be a whore. And there's Mallory's sister, who's totally a virgin. This is important because when someone tries to ruin Mallory's life, they send her fiance a letter saying she's a slut. At least she's not a whore, though.
And then there's Lady Ada. Whom the world worships as the Queen of Engines, and whom Mallory desperately tries to help. She's brilliant and beautiful and her father Lord Byron is Prime Minister, and she spends all her time with the royal family. And the plot hinges on a box of punch cards that came into her posession. Oh, look, it's a smart and useful female character who might be awesome, since everyone says she's awesome, right?
Well, no. Because it turns out she's a drug-addled, gambling addicted, hopelessly foolish slut who is coasting on a brief flowering of mathematical ability in her twenties that she's never repeated. And she totally sleeps around. That whore. It's embarrassing, really.
3. Structure. So remember how much trouble I had pinpointing who the main character is? Well, the structure of this book is ridiculous. I think the idea was that it was three linked novellas and an appendix a la Tolkein. Only, while each novella comes to a conclusion, none of the conclusions are particularly satisfying.
The first section features Sybil the whore, and lasts 71 pages. The most important thing she herself does is send a telegram. It ends with a murder for mysterious reasons.
Next section is Mallory the paleontologist, for 249 pages, none of them involving Sybil whatsoever. It vaguely mentions the incident that caps off her section, but not as anything important. He acquires Lady Ada's punch cards and hides them. Then has about a hundred pages of adventures with people trying to find the cards, which end without them finding the cards or him ever finding out what was with the cards. He also briefly meets Oliphant the spy, who promptly disappears. Suddenly, it's twenty years later and he dies of a stroke. Whoops!
The third section is Oliphant, and lasts for 72 pages. Sybil and Mallory are each mentioned in passing, but aren't particularly important. The murder is solved in a completely anticlimatic way that has no bearing on the plot. The cards are found and their purpose discovered, in a completely anticlimatic way that has no bearing on the plot. The telegram was apparently the thing that is important to resolving the new major problem that crops up. Only Oliphant gets syphilis in a paragraph near the end for no apparent reason and so disappears. The Very Important Message is delivered by a minor character who's barely appeared before, and the section ends before the addressee actually reads the message. So no resolution whatsoever.
The last section is a series of snippets--press clippings, songs, etc. It contains the pretty much unnecessary world-building and denounement that the authors couldn't be bothered to work into the book. But they came up with it, so you have to read it now. It's 32 pages in which they answer none of the questions you want answered but fill out the details of things they gave you enough hints to work out on your own. Useless.
Also, at the beginning and ends of chapters, they switch into present tense for no good reason. The bulk of each chapter is in past tense.
4. Endings, or lack thereof Each section? Progressively more pretentious and experimental. Sybil merely has her path diverge forever from the one interesting person she encountered. Mallory dies. Oliphant's section, on the other hand, suddenly devolves into blank verse for no apparent reason at all. You're in an adventure/political novel, and suddenly it's experimental fiction! Who knew? So really, it shouldn't surprise you that the same thing happens at the end of the errata. Bullshit callback to Mallory's death, a bad pun on some mystical nonsense they threw in that never made sense, and the final line of the novel is an exclamation point centered in the middle of the page, all by itself.
What.
5. Mystical nonsense they threw in that never made sense. So 99% of this book is alt-history. If Babbage had succeeded in building his difference engine, possibly all of these events could have happened. Physics and chemistry seem to work the way they should, mysticism is ridiculed, it's all backwards science fiction.
So why, on the last page of Mallory's section, does he suddenly discover Cthuloid beasties which are never mentioned again?
Also, Oliphant seems to be followed by an All-Seeing Eye that I can't figure out. It might be a metaphorical reference to the Illuminati or something. Or it could be a literal occult eye that he thinks is following him around. Not clear.
So basically, they wrote a cold but brilliant steampunk adventure novel with a problematic structure. But then, that seemed too much like selling out. After all, neatly tying up the plot threads you laid out in a satisfying way that justifies the amount of effort the characters went to following them is so hackneyed. Instead, throwing in mystical mumbo jumbo and replacing the actual climax with a few lines of incoherent, pretentious poetry is so much deeper.
And if you don't like it, well, it wasn't for you. You're just not deep enough to appreciate it. Go back to your Asimov and stop whining.
Whore.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 06:19 pm (UTC)From:Which is what makes the sexism so infuriating. Women are 50% of the population of London. In fact, there are two major characters and several minor ones who are female. Why is it that every single one (well, except virginal sister) is a dirty slut who is useless without a man telling her what to do? They easily could have pulled off the same thing as the racism-taunting, only better. But they didn't, and didn't seem to notice. Which makes me kind of think that the authors actually think all women are dirty sluts who are useless without a man telling us what to do.
Steampunk, with its glorification of colonialism and corsets, does walk a dangerous line on racism and sexism. But it doesn't have to fall, and I do feel a lot of works do just fine. Girl Genius and Soulless are both utterly delightful and turn a lot of sexist notions on their sides. Boneshaker is realistic about women's place in society at the time but equally realistic about how women's abilities can outstrip that place. If you count The Golden Compass or The Windup Girl, both feature multiple interesting female characters and good commentary on how they deal with being female. Even The Anubis Gates, which has a similar boy's adventure story feel, makes the love interest perfectly competent in her own right and comments on how she has to disguise her gender to get anything done.
Racism is less explicitly addressed, I find, which is unfortunate. But you can have a novel glorifying SCIENCE! and still manage to treat gender and race fairly. Which makes the utter fail here so much worse.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 07:39 pm (UTC)From:I love Girl Genius and I've been meaning to read Soulless; I also hear that Boneshaker is wonderful perhaps because it's more "weird West" than "prim Victorian steampunk," and takes more liberties with a diverse and challenging cast.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 08:03 pm (UTC)From:I love Soulless. It's total fluff, of course, which is exactly what it was designed to be. It does, however, fully acknowledge Victorian social mores and their downsides (as well as how a clever woman can get around some of them). Also, amusingly enough, notes acerbically that the English would have considered the Italians to be dark-skinned, uncouth, and only barely counting as civilized.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 08:26 pm (UTC)From: