![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When rising paleontologist Edward Mallory chances into possession of a stability-threatening Engine program (it's Godel's Proof, a theorem demonstrating that mathematical systems can never be consistent), he's thrust into a shadowy world of politics, spies and revolutionaries. Behind the mask of progress, 20th-century crises brew: Babbage Engines and Citizen Numbers are creating a police state the pollution of a hyper-accelerated industrial revolution makes London sporadically unlivable political propaganda is deconstructionist. England's hereditary lords have been replaced by merit-lords (Darwin, Huxley, etc.) Lord Byron's Industrial Radical party rules. In London of 1855, Lord Babbage's steam-driven Engines (mechanical computers roughly comparable to Univac) have transformed the world, blueprints thanks to Victorian paradigms of science and order. In their first major collaboration, sf heavyweights Gibson and Sterling spin an exquisitely clever filigree of Victorian alternate history, sparkling densely with ideas, moored by a challenging subtext of chaos theory and the lessons of recent paleontology. ![]()
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