The Difference Engine

This was the second William Gibson book I'd read, and was the first collaborative novel I'd read (until Niven & Pournelle's Footfall). The world-building here is mightily impressive, and having read Neuromancer before, I could certainly identify Gibson's prose when I read it - prose I would add, generally being a strong point of this book. The ending certainly reminded me of Neuromancer with its language, where Gibson just goes all out with his 'data melts and mingles, churned by gearwork to a skeletal bubbling pumice' stuff.

The story/plot was just OK. It had interesting ideas and I did appreciate the presence of real historical characters, which appear in abundance in this book.

While reading this, I also looked up online that Benjamin Disraeli, who appears in this book, wrote a novel in our real timeline, the characters of which also appear in The Difference Engine. So Disraeli appears in a novel alongside characters he invented in one of his novels he wrote in our timeline, which is the kind of recursive stuff I like, so thumbs up to Gibson and Sterling for that.

I was also impressed at the attention to detail of British culture given this was written by two North American writers. The characters use British English, there's an evident knowledge and grasp of concepts such as the House of Lords, and towns and cities that aren't London get a mention, which, for a North American-penned book set in England, is an unfortunate rarity. I guess that's just testament to Gibson and Sterling's skill as writers; it really did feel like two authors who are adept at their craft displaying their unrestrained creativity and imagination, and anything like that is naturally going to have some things that work really well and other things that don't.