Labor Day is a good time for sitting back and thinking how things might be otherwise. There’s a human tendency to see the state of the world today as having been more or less inevitable, its outcome loosely governed by our personal beliefs. Scholars have a name for this propensity to organize the past from the point of view of the present as if it were a simple story. They call it “Whig History.”
It was English historian Herbert Butterfield who contributed the useful phrase, 75 years ago. He was attacking the 19th Century Protestant gentlemen who saw all English history as culminating neatly in their reign.
A useful goad to meditation on the Whig interpretation is “The Difference Engine,” by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Published in 1991 and widely available in paperback, it is a counter-history, a more-than science-fiction classic that resembles Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”: verbally inventive, but located backward in time instead of forward.
The scene is London, 1855–30 years after Charles Babbage has invented the computer. Babbage is a historical figure, of course, an economist, mathematician, and inventor. He also has the honor of being history’s first “vaporware” vendor, in that he announced plans for a steam-driven, gear-worked data-processing machine–a “difference engine,” as he called it–but never actually completed a working model. The authors’ premise is, what if he had?
England has been catapulted into the computer age, 100 years ahead of schedule. Punch cards have been turned into a means of social control. Every citizen has a number, registered in great government Engines, immense assemblies of thousands of brass gear-works, each “big as railroad cars set on end.” Two of these are deployed, one in England, one in France–the French machine, its Grand Napoleon, is in a shed more than 100 miles long. A priestly class of “clackers” attend the machines. A kind of cold war exists between the two.
The social order has evolved along different lines as a result. A meritocracy has arisen. The early scientists known as savants have become the “rad lords”–Babbage and Darwin among them. The Duke of Wellington has directed cavalry charges against rioting British workers until he is blown to bits. The poet Lord Byron hasn’t died young in Greece; he has become prime minister. And Benjamin Disraeli, instead of prime minister, is a newspaper hack. The rich and their clergy are gone, but spies, bureaucrats, and secret police are everywhere.
The plot concerns a Modus, a mysterious box of punch cards passed by the daughter of the prime minister, Lady Ada Byron, to Edward Mallory, as he rescues her from thugs at the steam gurney races on Derby Day in Surrey. Lady Ada too is real, or at least a historical personage; she was a protege of Babbage, a formidable mathematician in her own right, a great heroine of today’s computer scientists. Mallory is not; he is merely the hero of the book, a stalwart straight out of Victorian fiction–fossil-hunter, secret agent, student of Mr. Shillingford’s System of Scientific Boxing.
What’s in the box? At first it seems to be a gaming system devised by Lady Ada (a k a Queen of Engines) that will enable a big enough machine to predict random events. No wonder that every villain in London is ready to kill for it. By the end of the book, it is all too clear that the nature of the program has been mistaken–but to find out exactly how, you will have to read the book.
The Brits have used their strength to divide the rest of the world into camps–especially rebellious North America, where the USA, the CSA, the Republic of Texas, and the Republic of California exist side by side. An expatriated Sam Houston is a central figure in London; New York has become a commune, led by Karl Marx.
The secret agents do their work: making people “disappear” (or exhibiting them dead in grisly ways), expunging their names from the records, editing their histories to serve personal or national goals.
The climax comes as London is caught in the Great Stink: a long-lasting atmospheric inversion combined with a heat wave that drives the gentry out of London and leaves the city at the mercy of the Luddites and anarchists who remain, led by the infamous Captain Swing. Civilization–or at least the Industrial Revolution–teeters on the brink.
“An appeal to the people!” reads a broadside. “Ye are free Lords of Earth, and need only COURAGE to make triumphant WAR on the Whore of Babylondon and all her learned thieves. Blood! Blood! Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance! . . . Let the slaves of crowned brigands grovel at the feet of Newton. WE shall destroy the Moloch Steam and shatter his rocking iron!” Nothing quite like the scene painted in “The Difference Engine” of the crisis of the summer of 1855 to underscore the joys of a peaceful Labor Day.
In the end, the mystery of the Modus is unraveled. The fates of characters are resolved. An epilogue throws against the wall all of the parts of the story that didn’t quite fit. We glimpse the London of 1991: “the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears, all air gone earthquake-dark in a mist of oil, in the frictioned heat of intermeshing wheels.”
Call it Whig Anti-History, if you like. How different is it from the world of 1997 that we know? Plenty. The processes of quantum electronics are a lot weirder than steam technology. And then again, not so much at all. Consider the news out of Moscow. Like London in the book, Russia is a world whose previously existing basis has been turned upside down.
The chief executive of the leading Russian publisher of children’s textbooks was assassinated last week, as gangs vie to control the industry. Exxon suddenly quit an enormous oil and gas deal, after the Ministry of Natural Resources reneged on its contract. Factions in Russia are contending for control of the nation; it is “a clash of wills out of which there (will) emerge something that probably no man ever willed” (which is how Herbert Butterfield believed that history is really made). The movers and shakers in modern Moscow party away in nightclubs that even the authors of “The Difference Engine” would be hard pressed to invent.
Indeed, the situation in Russia today has the inexorable technological momentum that is the real subject of “The Difference Engine.” True, the technology invading Russia today was invented somewhere else–almost all of it. But Moscow in the throes of its overnight modernization in the 20th Century resembles to a remarkable degree the 19th Century London that Gibson and Sterling imagined in their book.
