Desde que conocí el trabajo de Charles
Babbage me he preguntado ¿Que hubiera pasado si lo hubiera logrado?
¿si hubiera logrado terminar la Máquina
Diferencial o más aún, la Máquina
Analítica? William Gibson y Bruce Sterling se propusieron responder
esa pregunta y al hacerlo escribieron el trabajo fundacional de lo que ahora se
conoce como Steampunk: The Difference Engine. Es un libro entretenido,
si, pero con un final algo flojo, quizá mas por lo confuso que por una carencia
argumental.
En mi costumbre de marcar mis citas favoritas hubo dos patrones claros: citas con referencias a programación / ingeniería o citas relacionadas con la anticipada revolución feminista del universo paralelo de Gibson y Sterling.
She fetched the shawl out. So soft it was, and such a lovely violet color too, one of the strage new dyes clever people made from coal.1
"Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?"
Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter and the very Queen of Engines!"2
Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter and the very Queen of Engines!"2
The Frenchies were parley-vousing at each other.3
"Ashes!" Wakefield said firmly. "And pneumatic particles! They float through the air, soil the cog-oil, defile the gearing"4
"I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the House of Commons can't tell true clacking from a wind-up cooking-jack"5
"The Bureau gets your... well... unsettled sorts." Tobias smiled thinly. "They've even hired women sometimes."6
Its elegant solidity seemed to deny that there had ever been a trace of discord between Great Britain and her staunchest ally, Imperial France. Perhaps, thought Mallory wryly, the "misunderstandings" of the Napoleonic Wars could be blamed on the tyrant Wellington.7
The cool marble features of Lady Ada Byron, aloof and impassive, framed by curls and ringlets that were proofs o a pure geometry.8
"Yet I do believe, and must assert most strongly, that the Modus technique of self-referentiality will someday form the bedrock of a genuinely transcendent meta-system of calculatory mathematics9
"As thinking beings, we may envision the universe, though we have no finite way to sum it up."10
"In his final years, the great Lord Babbage, impatient of the limits of steam-power, sought to harness the lightning in the cause of calculation11
Then Web browsers came along, eventually causing newspapers and magazines to collapse, causing journalists to be fired in droves. This transformed the remaining bookstores into cofeehouses that sell T-shirts and hold ope-mike slams.
And just because we saw it coming doesn't make it our fault.12
1 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. The Difference Engine, New York, Ballantine Books, 1990, pág. 18.
2 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 26.
3 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 65.
4 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 150.
5 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 151.
6 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 158.
7 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 173.
8 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 388.
9 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 477.
10 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 478.
11 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 478.
11 GIBSON, William y STERLING, Bruce. Op. Cit., pág. 491.
