After The Difference Engine

I've always been curious how stuff developed in the Difference Engine between the conversation of Ada Lovelace and Fraser up to the dystopic future of 1991. There were so many people I was curious about and how history would have run its course. So, I was interested in the possibilities of sketching out a timeline, using both fictional characters (characters from Disraeli's novels were real in the Difference Engine, so one in particular I had in mind of using was Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, here Director of the Imperial Secret Service) as well as real ones (I imagine that in the meritocratic society of the Difference Engine with its enthusiasm for mathematics, logic and computers, we would see both a Prime Minister Bertrand Russell and a Prime Minister Alan Turing). I'm also curious to see people like John Stuart Mill, John Neville and John Maynard Keynes (whom I included in a PM list a while back), Theodore Roosevelt, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov and Keir Hardie live their lives in this timeline. Plus, what will Vladimir Lenin and Kerensky end up doing? And how are things going in my beloved Scandinavia, is there any chance that Alfred Nobel could play an interesting role?

So, purley in the interest of fan-fiction writing, help me sketch out how we end up in steampunk-Matrix of 1991.
 
Many 20th century OTL historical figures would not exist due to the butterfly effect. If you want to include them in this discussion, this thread had better go into the ASB forum where the butterfly effect can be suspended without people complaining.
 
Many 20th century OTL historical figures would not exist due to the butterfly effect. If you want to include them in this discussion, this thread had better go into the ASB forum where the butterfly effect can be suspended without people complaining.

I was under the belief that people in this forum didn't actually care that much about a perfectly rigid application of the butterfly effect. I mean, I have seen Theodore Roosevelt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler all appear in timelines where the point of divergence predates their births by years if not centuries, and to say that they are "analogues" is quite frankly mere wish-thinking. Most brothers aren't twin-like beings, you know.

A complete appreciation of the consequences of Chaos would inevitably lead to that even parts of the world you'd deem to be completely isolated would immediately begin feeling the effects of small, small ripples making sure that just the right sperm won't hit the egg.

I mean, if it's the case that this timeline should be moved to ASB, then a strong argument can be made for moving the majority of timelines in this forum to ASB. :confused:
 

Flubber

Banned
I've always been curious how stuff developed in the Difference Engine between the conversation of Ada Lovelace and Fraser up to the dystopic future of 1991.


I always read the 1991 passage you refer to as a depiction of transhuman future. There simply are no humans left or, more accurately, no humans we'd recognize as humans and so your questions are essentially moot. (Edit: A quick peek at the novel's Wiki page seems to support that interpretation.)

As for the various post-POD people you mention, none would exist. Especially after such a huge POD.
 
I was under the belief that people in this forum didn't actually care that much about a perfectly rigid application of the butterfly effect. I mean, I have seen Theodore Roosevelt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler all appear in timelines where the point of divergence predates their births by years if not centuries, and to say that they are "analogues" is quite frankly mere wish-thinking. Most brothers aren't twin-like beings, you know.

A complete appreciation of the consequences of Chaos would inevitably lead to that even parts of the world you'd deem to be completely isolated would immediately begin feeling the effects of small, small ripples making sure that just the right sperm won't hit the egg.

I mean, if it's the case that this timeline should be moved to ASB, then a strong argument can be made for moving the majority of timelines in this forum to ASB. :confused:

My apologies. I mostly browse pre-1900 for the short hypothetical scenarios, not full blown timelines, so I assumed there was the same rigid standard for plausibility and the butterfly effect as seen in some of the other subfora.

On the other hand, discussion of published works of fiction usually go into either ASB or Books and Media.
 
My apologies.

Perhaps I went too far there with my objection... :p

No worries. ;)

I mostly browse pre-1900 for the short hypothetical scenarios, not full blown timelines, so I assumed there was the same rigid standard for plausibility and the butterfly effect as seen in some of the other subfora.

On the other hand, discussion of published works of fiction usually go into either ASB or Books and Media.

Well, in all honesty I've been somewhat confused by the varying degrees of realism people expect from timelines. My understanding, and the understanding I would assume most people here have, is that alternate history constitutes a form of fiction. Other people are far more inclined to consider it serious speculation that requires a highly rigorous, historiographical and scientific attitude.
 
It has been some decades :eek: since I read the book, but I did like it a lot when I read it.

I don't remember any "dystopic" future being clearly indicated; the last paragraph (if I recall correctly) might suggest that, or it could just be a glimpse at a weird future with its terrors but also beauties, as seems likely if you start the clock of exponential growth of computing power way back in the middle of the 19th century!

As for "butterflies," I take the position that if we want a timeline with some dramatic POD way back in time but we still want parallelism, we can have it without worrying about random/chaotic butterflies of the "different sperm meets egg" variety--insofar, that is, as these "butterflies" are due to mere randomness. We can bear in mind that if there are numerous timelines stemming from PODs from our exact past, meanwhile there were at the time of any given POD, other timelines already in existence from earlier PODs, some of which will, due precisely to these same "butterflies" operating on it, appear to closely parallel OTL at that moment to all macro-scale evidence. We could have our POD happen in one of those, and the different butterflies working on different (but only microscopically and unobservably so) initial conditions will, among the infinite timelines emerging from that POD, include ones that happen to parallel OTL--we can look at one of those and call it our alt-timeline.

Well and good, for random butterflies. But what we are looking at in an interesting alternate timeline is new, significant alternative historical events that have systematic consequences, and these will tend increasingly to systematically preclude parallelism of people and institutions and cities and so forth.

In The Difference Engine for instance, the United States is Balkanized, with a Confederacy, an independent Texas and California republic, IIRC Deseret, and the Manhattan Commune under Karl Marx's leadership all split off from the USA--there might even have been a New England confederacy as well. Obviously the marriages of the Roosevelt family are going to be affected! Well, if the Roosevelts, being New York Patroons, choose to marry within their narrow and local circle as I suspect they did OTL, we can invoke the above-mentioned "Anti-Butterflies" (ie, we choose a timeline where the butterflies happen to produce the same result as OTL in purely chaotic matters) to still get Theodore if we want him. But if in fact OTL Theodore's ancestors included people it would be implausible to have getting married in the late 19th century in this timeline, then he's gone--not so much "butterflied" as eliminated by the logic of the timeline.

The reason the USA is shattered, it is pretty much stated clearly IIRC, is that the British Rad Lords have been enacting a policy of weakening their potential American rival with dramatic results.

So I suspect the Manhattan Commune is in some peril; it may have been convenient for British interests to have the USA's main and growing port city split off, even under a radical Communist, and perhaps Marx's theory of Communism seems less incisive and threatening in this timeline, given the pragmatic empirical progressivism of the Radical Lords of the Byron/Babbage tradition. Still I suspect sooner or later the British will seek to swat the annoying fly of incitement to proletarian revolution.

This might backfire on them, maybe Marx's Commune will be the seed of a new Communist version of the USA; perhaps a Marxist framework is just what the Americans need to catch up and overtake the Rad Lord's Machine-aided computational Machiavellian order.

Marx of course was not much of a leader of organized movements; he was widely revered as a prophet and visionary, but when he tried to lead actual organizations, he had his core of loyalists but also badly alienated others, leading to major factional splits. As I rather like Marx and the idea of a Manhattan Commune (and perhaps greater Communal Union of North America?) I rather hope he's survived in power thus far because among his loyalists are some lieutenants who manage the interpersonal politics for him.

All this stuff about Marx is by way of getting to answering someone else's question about Lenin:

It seems likely to me that systematic changes to Russia will make the appearance of Lenin or any other members of the Bolshevik cast unlikely. However Russian society by its size and isolation from Western Europe may indeed insulate the affairs of the kind of people who were ancestors of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al so that our "antibutterfly" solution may apply and we have these very people. And the situation of Russia, while systematically different, may be quite similar--too backward to win against Western Europe but too big to be subdued by them, too useful in its reactionary potentials for Western powers to systematically want to see its regime destroyed but having too much economic potential for them to leave the place alone either. Upshot, massive discontent and a search for a viable and if at all possible distinctively "Russian" solution. If the Manhattan Commune is still there, or has even grown, it might be the inspiration of some of these factions of Russian dissidents (vice versa though its very success might give it less of a mythic cachet than the world's Leftists of the late 19th/early 20th century got from the romantic martyrdom of the Paris Commune and other abortive revolutions--so maybe if you want alt-Lenin, you need for the Manhattan Commune to be brutally surpressed:eek::p).

If the "dystopic" end of the novel is indeed the triumph of a transhuman Machine society in which humanity is irrelevant, it still will take a long time to get there. Difference Engine type computers are inherently very slow compared to electronic ones. Presumably electronics will get developed earlier than OTL and then the rate will pick up, presumably developing transistors, integrated then printed circuits, etc. But this will still take time!

Lots of time, generations then, to write timelines about essentially human steampunk societies that may or may not succumb to the Robot Revolt.
 

Flubber

Banned
It seems likely to me that systematic changes to Russia will make the appearance of Lenin or any other members of the Bolshevik cast unlikely. However Russian society by its size and isolation from Western Europe may indeed insulate the affairs of the kind of people who were ancestors of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al so that our "antibutterfly" solution may apply and we have these very people.


I'd still say no because of both nature and nurture. In questions of this type, too many people concentrate on the right sperm meeting the right egg at the right time while completely - and perhaps purposely - ignoring sociological "pudding" in which in any particular "raisin" exists. In the novel for example, Keats and Shelley, historical persons whose births predate the POD, have lived past their twenties, unlike in the OTL, but neither are poets. Instead, Keats is a programmer interested in multimedia art while Shelley is a wanted Luddite.

Among many, many other things, the Germany, Switzerland, and Austria-Hungary which provided refuge and in some cases funding for Lenin, Stalin, and other Russian "revolutionaries" of various types will not exist in their OTL form and with their OTL concerns. Lenin's parents may still get together at the right place and time, but their little monster will not resemble the monster we know because the sociological changes.

The raisin is part of the pudding, we cannot deny or ignore that.
 
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