Rating: 
Summary: Clunk, Clunk, Clunk, Crash!
Review: This text is so filled with irrelevant detail, and the plot so slow, that even in this revised edition, it is difficult to generate any interest in the story itself. Although the story revolves around the intriguing premise of Babbage's engines achieving a pervasive historical prominence, this premise alone is not nearly enough to sustain this work. The Difference Engine ultimately falls prey to its own overcalculated storyline.
Rating:
Summary: I was not impressed
Review: Many people enjoyed this book for richness of detail, for complexity of storyline, for depth of research into the 19th century. Yes, all those elements were present. But the reason Gibson is popular is that his books usually offer a gripping and interesting plot. You may have to reread the books to catch everything, but you are swept up in the action the first time around anyway. This book was written to show that Gibson and Sterling have done a lot of research and think deep thoughts, NOT to tell an interesting story. The plot was boring. And that pretty much summarizes the book. Plenty of details, plenty of atmosphere, no story. Anne Rice can sometimes get away with this, and maybe Gibson alone could have pulled it off, but the story-by-committee idea just did not work out.
Rating: 
Summary: What I heard Gibson say about this book while in Minneapolis
Review: I haven't read it, but while he was at Dream Haven in Mpls., signing books, he said that if they accomplished what they wanted to in writing the book, no one would understand it for another 50 years. That was about five years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Very dull
Review: Very slow and very dull. The only interesting bit was the heroes' journey into the slums of London.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable book
Review: I liked this book. I think a lot of the curt cutdowns of this book are from teens or others who expect to see some kind of the future meets history. This is a good book, but it is not a book about a future that might have been - you won't find nucleur subs and spaceships and travel to the stars and cities in the clouds. Instead, it is a detailed historical novel set in the 1800s. The book did drag at times, and the mystery of what the cards are is not only dragged out, but the solution to the mystery is anticlimactic and a let-down. Also, once the mystery is solved, you realize (much to your surprise) that there is more book to be read. I would recommend this book, nonetheless. If you like this book, you might consider "The Four Hundred" - another book set in the 1800s (but not an "alternate history" book).
Rating:
Summary: Despite the richness of detail, the novel drags.
Review: An enviable array of critical raves lines the first few pages of The Difference Engine, including this one from director Ridley Scott: "A visionary steam-powered heavy metal fantasy! Gibson and Sterling create a high Victorian virtual reality of extraordinary richness and detail." In this novel Gibson teams up with Bruce Sterling, a brilliant sci-fi writer himself, to provide an amazing picture of Victorian England. Both writers are notable for their attention to detail, and their combined effort teems with thousands of minutiae from the period, not to mention large themes based on the Victorian preoccupation with such things as science, technology, exploration, and steam. The novel belongs to a particular genre of science fiction called alternate history, where the writer answers the question, if such-and-such had happened (or never happened), what would the world be like now? The Difference Engine tries to imagine what the world would be like if the computer had been invented 100 years earlier. It is set in England in 1855. Sci-fi pundits have dubbed the novel "steampunk" because those who control the steam-driven computers control society. The structure of the novel falls into three discreet, self-contained units all concerned with a case full of rare and valuable computer cards. In the first part, Sybil Gerard, a fallen woman, inherits the cards from her boyfriend, who was murdered for them. In the long middle section Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a scientist famous for his discovery of the Brontosaurus, takes charge of them next. And in the conclusion Lawrence Oliphant, a gentleman detective with advanced syphillis, finally solves the mystery of their whereabouts. Alternate history writers love to recast famous figures in altered roles. The writers have done just that with, for example, three of England's greatest romantic poets. Lord Byron has become prime minister, and Disraeli (the prime minister of the history books) a hack writer. Shelly is some sort of anarchist rebel and Keats has become a kinotropist, a specialist in a sort of gas-illuminated light show of computer designed images. Keats, also, seems to be the only one who knows what the cards signify. Just to show how far the villains will go to get the computer cards and the power the cards represent, they devise a way to break down all of London's eco system as the city grinds to a halt and falls prey to looters, many of whom join the villains' rebellion: "The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth." Despite the raves from critics and all the wonderful detail, the novel sometimes dragged for me. As a lover of Victorian England (my graduate specialization), I perhaps should have liked it more, but I found the villain and some of the main characters, including Mallory, uninteresting. I wasn't convinced that things were much different in Gibson's and Sterlings's reality even with the addition of the computer, a noisy, mechanical, affair. The characters might as well have been fighting over an Egyptian mummy for all the difference the computer made. And the long center section with the inevitable Gibson pitched battle (I'm betting my money that Gibson wrote the middle part and Sterling wrote the bookends) didn't thrill me. Lawrence Oliphant's genteel manners and shrewd detective work make him a fascinating character. The novel might have been more satisfying if he'd been the hero all the way through instead of just the last 100 pages. The experimental conclusion with various bits and pieces from personal journals, letters, advertisements, recordings, and popular songs attempts to tie everything up. But one never has the sense that the cards nor the computers were as important as the writers want us to believe. Did the cards really contain just a mathematical gambling system, as everyone seemed to think, or were they something more ominous and earthshaking? Keats comments that they were far more important than anyone would ever know but doesn't say why. They simply are never satisfactorily explained.
Rating:
Summary: Not Gibson's finest, but worth reading
Review: I have to admit that I'm much more of a William Gibson fan than a Bruce Sterling fan. For me, the book was very uneven-- parts of it were fascinating in their speculative detail, while other parts were straighforward and flat out dull. The setting was far more interesting than the plot. Still, I thought the interesting parts made the boring parts worth wading through, and the author's unique vision remains in my imagination years after having read it. If done right, it would make a good movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Astonishing
Review: In what is possibly the finest work of science fiction written in the last decade. By the fictional displacement of information technologies, Sterling and Gibson transcend the limitations of their individual works and instead create a document of stunning insight into the interaction between human culture and technology's own "engine" of change. This is writing at the cutting edge of the 20th century's only significant literature - science fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad... but not great, either.
Review: The concept of the Victorian era transformed by Babbage engines has really come of age, now that a _real_ Difference Engine has been constructed after Babbage's design. Therefore, I was really excited to get my hands on the book--- and disappointed when I finished devouring it. Yeah, the concepts were there, and it started out as interesting, but the book soon became a muddled and tiresome exercise in trying to get to the end. Not only was the plot unclear, but the details just bogged down the story (although the story may not be the main point with fiction of this kind). Some cool stuff, definitely-- if you're a fan of the authors, read it-- but it just didn't grab me. I'm relieved to see I wasn't the only one. To be entirely fair to the authors, though, I wasn't up on my 1800's history enough to know what was historical and what was alternate-timeline.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant alternate history
Review: Historical characters go steampunk. John Keats in motion pictures, Sam Houston as an exile, Ada Lovelace as a heroine... what more could you ask? Not your standard SF, but if you like what might have been instead of what might be, go for it.
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