CHAPTER 4 . . . TAKAYUKI TATSUMI

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE IN A POST-ENLIGHTENMENT CONTEXT

FRANKLIN, EMERSON, AND GIBSON AND STERLING

The Difference Engine and the Cold War

When Gibson and Sterling published their collaboratively written novel, The Difference Engine , in 1990, it was natural for readers of science fiction to consider it each writer’s magnum opus. ¹ What they joined forces to represent is an alternate-history year 1855, when Great Britain is empowered by steam-driven computer networks based on distinguished mathematician Charles Babbage’s perfection of the Analytical Engine, when people enjoy writing on steam-driven typewriters, watching steam-driven TV, making use of steam-driven credit cards, and even being annoyed by steam-driven computer viruses composed by flash clackers (akin to today’s computer hackers). Here, the Duke of Wellington, the Tory prime minister, attempted to repress the emerging class of scientists and intellectuals (savants) and industrials. He is assassinated by a bomb, whereupon the Romantic genius Lord George Gordon Byron’s Industrial Radicals take over. Lord Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada Byron, later countess of Lovelace, who collaborates with Babbage to produce the first computer in the world and is admired in the twentieth century as the founding mother of computer programming, achieves the charismatic status of Queen of Engines and Queen of Fashion. Byron’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley is a defeated Luddite sympathizer who loses his political influence. John Keats is very active as a “kinotropist,” a steam visualist. The utopian idea of pantisocracy invites major Romanticists William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to found a new nation, Susquehanna Phalanstery, in North America. Distinguished German philosopher Karl Marx, who coauthored The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels, establishes a communist commune in Manhattan. Moreover, Japanese leading intellectuals, such as Yukichi Fukuzawa and Arinori Mori from Meirokusha (Meiji 6 Society), an intellectual team organized in the sixth year of the Meiji era for the purposes of civilization and enlightenment, visit Britain to import steam-driven computer devices.

Despite a variety of historical figures whose lives Gibson and Sterling take the liberty of modifying in the context of alternate Great Britain, the novel’s plot, which centers around the McGuffin quest, is as simple as the Holy Grail quest. This plot begins with an episode of the first chapter’s protagonist, Sybil Gerard, the ruined daughter of executed Luddite agitator Walter Gerard, who happens to obtain a box containing the secret program Modus, composed by her master and flash clacker, Dandy Mick Radley, which might turn this alternate Pax Britannica upside down. The Modus bears the name of McGuffin in the novel, which is handed down from key person to key person, ending up with the amazing revelation of the secret of the whole alternate historical world.

Of course, literary history tells us that once an epoch-making masterpiece is published, it often mystifies contemporary readers so deeply as to be neglected in the darkness of history. In retrospect, when The Difference Engine was released in 1990, fans of cyberpunk who had expected Gibson and Sterling to keep demonstrating the cutting edge of postinternet computer culture were more or less disappointed by their collaboration. Hoping to make use of cyberpunk writers’ works for promoting advanced capitalist society in the heyday of internet journalism, these fans were puzzled by the book’s alternative Victorian age. However, as time went on, what Gibson and Sterling did in the collaboration gradually came to be evaluated correctly. Despite a long controversy over whether The Difference Engine is cyberpunk or steampunk, this mega-novel has gained importance as a work classified as hardcore cyberpunk in the disguise of steampunk. Remember Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s alternate historical tale “Mozart in Mirrorshades” (1985), and you will easily understand that cyberpunk writers gradually came to put more emphasis on time than on space.

Thus, in my introduction to the Japanese edition of The Difference Engine (1991), translated by Hisashi Kuroma, which started with a note on Back to the Future 3 (1990) featuring a typical mad scientist Emmett Lathrop “Doc” Brown’s steam-driven time machine, I unwittingly attempted to make the novel intelligible enough by intertwining it with this Hollywood blockbuster film. The emergence of the radically brand-new in literary history is usually considered unintelligible by its contemporaries. Left in Victorian America, Doc renovated a steam locomotive into a gorgeously embellished steam-driven time machine, with which he and his family—his wife, Clara Clayton, an avid reader of scientific adventures, and their two kids, Jules and Verne—time-traveled to see Marty and his girlfriend, Jennifer, in 1985, nearly 100 years ahead. Indeed, Back to the Future (1985) featured Marty’s time travel between 1985 and 1955, when he amazed Doc by telling him that in 1980, twenty-five years later, Ronald Reagan, who was well known in the 1950s for being only a B-class movie star, was to serve as the fortieth president of the United States. In the late 1980s, Reagan, who was deeply aware of the possibilities of “computer chip” and “satellite broadcasting,” in a speech at Moscow State University delivered on May 31, 1988, joined forces with Mikhail Gorbachev to deconstruct the huge binary opposition between the Soviet Union and the United States, but we cannot doubt that the mid-1980s cyberpunk spirit of Lo Tek in cyberspace and junkyard went so far as to affect the political authorities embodying the Cold War. Thus, we may assume that early 1990s steampunk alternative history, coinciding with the steam-driven time machine in Back to the Future 3 , pioneered the frontier of creative anachronism in the process of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is, the collapse of the Cold War system, which invited Francis Fukuyama to speculate on “the end of history” in post-Hegelian fashion.

Put simply, between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, 1990 saw a paradigm shift from territorial clear-cut binary opposition to temporal chaotic inconsistency. It is no coincidence that The Difference Engine and Michael Crichton’s bestseller Jurassic Park were published in the same year; they shared a deep interest in chaos theory as a tool for reconstructing history that, in both novels, their chapters are simply titled “The First Iteration,” “The Second Iteration,” “The Third Iteration,” and so on. Whereas the former’s chaos theory begins with the archeology of artificial intelligence in Victorian America, the latter’s centers around the idea of technologization of paleontology in a postmodern theme park. In the heyday of new historicism and postcolonialism around 1990, the concept of time got more and more plastic.

The Bicentenary of Frankenstein , or, the Secret Origin of Cyberpunk

To meditate on the structure of time in alternate history, we had better start by reconsidering an alternate literary history of science fiction. It has often been pointed out that although it features a number of historical figures ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, The Difference Engine strangely lacks reference to Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is regarded as the origin of science fiction and whose story of artificial intelligence in Victorian England cannot help but recall the fate of the steam-driven computer in The Difference Engine . Of course, Frankenstein was published in 1818, two decades earlier than Babbage’s blueprint of the analytical engine in 1837. Given that Mary Shelley passed away in 1851, it is highly plausible that in the 1830s she could have known Babbage’s idea supported by Lovelace, the first computer programmer. They are, after all, Victorian contemporaries. Gibson and Sterling’s collaboration could well be called their revision of Frankenstein’s monster in the postcyberpunk age. Somewhere between the bicentenary of Frankenstein and the thirtieth anniversary of The Difference Engine , a radical rereading of these novels will enrich our understanding of each.

The place to start should be with Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and one of the greatest inspirations for Shelley. Franklin remains one of the most famous Americans, for he is featured on the back of the $100 bill, the most expensive currency in the United States. Although he never served as president of the United States, Franklin is still admired as a major voice of the American Revolution who ended up creating the testing ground for democracy. Despite D. H. Lawrence’s modernist critique of Franklin, in which Lawrence boasts of being “many men,” ² Franklin himself had already been famous for being “many men”: he was a printer, journalist, tall-tale-teller, philosopher, scientist, inventor, musician, statesman, and “self-made man,” among other things. In this respect, Franklin has long been compared with Yukichi Fukuzawa featured in The Difference Engine , for the latter is one of the Founding Fathers of modern Japan, well known for being as multifaceted as the former: he is a philosopher, educator, journalist, translator, and entrepreneur. Fukuzawa is featured on the ¥10,000 bill, the most expensive bill in Japan. Simply put, Franklin and Fukuzawa still remain significant, for both of them contributed much to establishing modern nations based on the vision of the Enlightenment.

What matters today is the fact that Immanuel Kant, the greatest champion of the European Enlightenment, cautioned people against defying the natural order of things and was keenly aware of Franklin’s achievements. In his 1755 essay, “The Modern Prometheus,” Kant states: “There is such a thing as right taste in natural science, which knows how to distinguish the wild extravagances of unbridled curiosity from cautious judgements of reasonable credibility. From the Prometheus of recent times Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, down to the man who wants to extinguish the fire in the workshop of Vulcanus, all these endeavors result in the humiliating reminder that Man never can be anything more than a man.” ³ Kant clearly refers to Franklin’s kite experiment in 1752 that proved thunder to be the effect of electrical discharge, not the anger of God that had long humbled colonial Puritans in New England. Hence the lightning rod symbolized the age of the Enlightenment. Yukichi Fukuzawa, following Franklin’s example, did not form a strong attachment to religions but Unitarianism, the backbone of the Enlightenment as represented by Thomas Jefferson, another Founding Father of the United States.

I do not want to undertake a comparative study of Enlightenment Unitarians. What should be stressed here is that, inspired by Kant’s article “The Modern Prometheus,” which was published three years after Franklin’s experiment, Shelley titled her novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus . Given that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is born with the help of lightning, it is plausible that Shelley had Franklin in mind.

Let me illustrate the point by showing how Franklin’s demystification of lightning enlightened Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein. Although deeply fascinated with the wild fancies of old alchemical philosophers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, Dr. Frankenstein is enlightened by a “most violent and terrible thunder-storm” he witnesses in Bellerive, Jura, in Switzerland:

It [the thunder-storm] advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbands of wood. I never beheld any thing so utterly destroyed.

The catastrophe of this tree excited my extreme astonishment; and I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning. He replied, “Electricity;” describing at the same time the various effects of that power. He constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds.

This last stroke completed the overthrow of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, who had so long reigned the lords of my imagination. ⁴

This experience invited the protagonist to create a human being by making use of the art of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” that is, animating the amalgam of dead men’s parts. We should pay attention to the spark of life, a kind of lightning as the spirit of the Enlightenment:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet . It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. ⁵

It is safe to assume that what Victor Frankenstein calls “a spark of being” is nothing other than the effect of electricity. Nonetheless, the creature turned out to be so disgusting that, “unable to endure the aspect of the being” he had created, Dr. Frankenstein “rushed out of the room.” Later, the creature fled his master’s laboratory.

I have emphasized Franklin’s significance not simply because his experiment with the kite inspired Shelley to imagine Dr. Frankenstein, a man obsessed with the idea of creating a human being, but also because he served as a kind of hacker/flash clacker in terms of Gibson and Sterling’s Great Britain, who unwittingly constructed the discourse of alternate history. As the Whole Earth Review , a descendant of the legendary countercultural magazine the Whole Earth Catalog inaugurated in 1968, featured Franklin in mirror shades in its cover illustration for the summer 1991 issue, this Founding Father could well be redefined as the father of all the hackers, capable of thieving data and rewriting programs just like Case and Bobby in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy and Dandy Mick Radley in The Difference Engine . Although the mother of science fiction re-created Franklin in Frankenstein, cyberpunk champions wanted to feature skillful hackers Shelley failed in describing who are all the children of Franklin, not Frankenstein. This is the reason The Difference Engine does not mention Mary Shelley and her masterpiece.

Franklin’s Monster: From Self-Made Man to Man-Made Self

If you read Benjamin Franklin’s text very closely, you will witness moments that convince you that although he has long been popular as a typically American self-made man, Franklin also created a man-made self. What Shelley’s subtitle “the Modern Prometheus” tells us is that she is indebted to Kant’s interpretation of Franklin and that she was inspired by how Franklin created quite a few man-made selves, if unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. First, let us reread the poem “Epitaph,” composed in 1728, when Franklin was only twenty-two years old:

The Body of

B. Franklin Printer,

(Like the Cover of an Old Book) Its Contents torn out

And stript of its Lettering and Gilding)

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be lost;

For it will, (as he believe’d) appear once more,

In a new & more elegant Edition,

Revised and corrected

By the Author . ⁶

What amazes us most is not so much the youth of the author but his vision of himself as a book that will be revised and reprinted in the future. At seventeen, with little money in his pocket but already an expert printer, he proceeded to make his way in the world, subject to the usual “errata,” as he often called his mistakes, but confident that he could profit from lessons learned and not repeat them. Franklin retains this idea consistently until he writes his autobiography in 1771 at the age of sixty-five: “That felicity, when I reflected on it, has induced me sometimes to say, that were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantage authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first.” ⁷ Once again, Franklin defines his life as correctible and modifiable, that is, plastic. To put it simply, while Franklin as a human must pass away someday, his life as a book will keep getting updated and surviving the predicament of the ages. Franklin is mortal, but his life as a book will remain immortal, just like artificial intelligence. In this respect, I completely agree with Lawrence, who in the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature (1918–1919) reconsidered Franklin not just as “the perfect human being of Godwin” ⁸ but as “the very Son of Man, man made by the power of the human will, a virtuous Frankenstein monster.” ⁹

Here we have to remember that Franklin is well known by a variety of pseudonyms, such as Silence Dogood, the persona of a middle-aged widow, under whose name he submitted some satirical essays to his brother’s newspaper, the New England Courant , at the age of sixteen; and Richard Saunders, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac , filled with maxims, most of which he created himself, for achieving wealth and preaching hard work and thrift.

His most problematic pseudonym is Polly Baker, in his radical feminist article “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747), who was once accused of having illegitimate children but who criticized bachelors in colonial America who did not want to get married. Based on the Enlightenment discourse of deism that gives priority to Nature over God, Polly Baker’s speech is so logical and powerful as to attract a wider audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, despite the pseudonymous persona, Polly Baker, once dismissed as a ruined woman, promptly gained fame as a kind of virtual idol who championed a kind of protofeminist philosophy recalling Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850) but also Gibsonian characters like Molly Millions in Neuromancer and Sybil Gerard in The Difference Engine .

Nonetheless, we may locate the true reason for her creation in the author’s biography. In 1730, Franklin unofficially married Deborah Read, the daughter of his first landlady. But in the next year he came to have an illegitimate child, and Read accepted Franklin’s son William into the household. It is ironic that while Franklin becomes one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, William later became governor of New Jersey and a Loyalist during the American Revolution. Franklin published the Polly Baker hoax, not necessarily because he hoped to construct a protofeminist discourse but because his extramarital affair required him to compose a virtually feminist speech as a correction of the great errata in life. What matters here is that whatever the reason, the persona Polly Baker came to have her own life as a pre-Frankenstein monster, capturing the imagination of Enlightenment America. Although the colonial Puritans developed a fear of challenging the Judeo-Christian God as the origin of everything, the Founding Fathers demystified the British monarch, as well as the idea of an angry God, by championing deism and Unitarianism as the background of the Enlightenment. To be more precise, as Gordon Wood points out, Franklin had spent a couple of years in London from 1724 to 1726 and only wished to become a gentleman. In 1748, at the age of forty-two, Franklin believed he had acquired sufficient wealth and gentility to retire from active business. Thus, he could finally become a gentleman, a man of leisure who no longer had to work for a living. ¹⁰ Nonetheless, in the course of events he was needed to join and lead the American Revolution, giving up the plan of spending his later years as a Loyalist gentleman. Therefore, the portrait of a failed gentleman helped invent the myth of Franklin as a self-made man. However, Franklin the self-made man succeeded in producing a man-made self; he accomplished it by animating the pseudonymous characters. Franklin not only created but also became his own monster, as Lawrence pointed out in his aborted version of Studies in Classic American Literature . However illegitimate he or she is, Franklin’s monster, or his own monstrous self, gets unbound as the modern Prometheus, observing the biblical duty, as Polly Baker notes: “Encrease and Multiply.” This is the revised version of “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

What Franklin created here is the discourse of revisionism pervading the winner’s history of the United States. Insofar as you are living in the winner’s country, it is possible to rewrite history quite radically and conceal inconvenient truth. For example, the Norton Anthology of American Literature , the most comprehensive anthology in the field, takes the liberty of ignoring the Philippine America War and the Korean War, for they caused inconvenience to the winner’s history defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, today liberal intellectuals consider historical revisionism incredibly risky. Do not forget how American audiences have enjoyed the Back to the Future trilogy, in which the director takes the liberty of revising history. In this respect, Doc’s admiration of Franklin, clear from his portrait exhibited on the wall of the laboratory, should not be ignored; Doc must have been conscious of Franklin not only as a talented inventor of the lightning rod but as a historical revisionist rationalizing time travel. Cultivating the way from self-made man to man-made self and inventing the all-American discourse of historical revisionism, Franklin deserves the name of protocyberpunk author of alternate history.

Time Considered as a Chaotic Steam Fog: Toward Cyber-Transcendentalism

At this point, let me reconsider how Gibson and Sterling’s novel describes Yukichi Fukuzawa, the Japanese Franklin, and his colleagues trying to import the steam-driven computer into Meiji Japan. When journalist Lawrence Oliphant and paleontologist Edward Mallory are introduced to the Japanese intellectuals, headed by Fukuzawa, in the service of “His Imperial Majesty the Mikado of Japan,” they are astonished at the Japanese gynoid crafted by the Hosokawa family and presented to them as a royal gift for Her Britannic Majesty:

Bligh handed Mr [Koan] Matsuki a whisky bottle; Mr Matsuki began to decant it into an elegant ceramic jug, at the right hand of the Japanese woman. She made no response. Mallory began to wonder if she were ill, or paralyzed. Then Mr Matsuki fitted the little jug into her right hand with a sharp wooden click. He rose, and fetched a gilded crank-handle. He stuck the device into the small of her back and began to twist it, his face expressionless. A high-pitched coiling sound emerged from the woman’s innards.

“She is a dummy!” Mallory blurted.

“More a marionette, actually,” Oliphant said. “The proper term is ‘automaton,’ I believe.”

Mallory drew a breath. “I see! Like one of those Jacuot-Droz toys, or Vaucanson’s famous duck, eh?” . . .

The automaton began pouring drinks. There was a hinge within her robed elbow, and a second in her wrist; she poured whisky with a gentle slither of cables and a muted wooden clicking. “She moves much like an Engine-guided Maudsley lathe,” Mallory noted. “Is that where they got the plans?”

“No, she’s entirely native,” said Oliphant. Mr Matsuki was passing little ceramic cups of whisky down the table. “Not a bit of metal in her—all bamboo, and braided horsehair, and whalebone springs. The Japanese have known how to make such dolls for many years—karakuri , they call them.” ¹¹

By exhibiting the execution of their own archetypal AI, the founding fathers of modern Japan astonished the British intellectuals, who had enjoyed the heyday of steam-driven cybercivilization. As Arinori Mori explains after the demonstration of the gynoid, in this alternate history it is not America but Britain that “opened our ports with the iron fleet.” ¹² Deeply obliged to Great Britain, Fukuzawa states very nobly, “We will be allies with you. . . . The Britain of Asia will bring civilization and enlightenment to all Asian peoples.” ¹³ To further centralize Great Britain and render the United States peripheral in this alternate history, Gibson and Sterling deprive distinguished US commodore Matthew Perry of the honor of opening Japan in 1853, characterizing the heroine Sybil as sympathetic with Sam Houston, the political refugee from the independent state of Texas. Given that Gibson and Sterling are products of the American South (Gibson from South Carolina, Sterling from Texas), The Difference Engine is set in the mid-1850s as an alternate history composed from the Southern perspective, in which the Civil War does not happen yet. Nonetheless, we should not neglect discourses of postwar Japanese productivity and success, embodied in such texts as Ezra F. Vogel’s Japan as No. 1 , as a hidden agenda of the novel. ¹⁴ In the fifth chapter, “The Fifth Iteration: The All-Seeing Eye,” in which Oliphant’s nephew became fascinated with the Japanese tea-doll, the uncle tells him about how promising Japanese technology is. “The Japanese power their dolls with springs of baleen, Affie, ‘Whale whiskers,’ they call the stuff. They haven’t yet learned from us the manufacture of proper springs, but soon they shall. When they do, their dolls shan’t break so easily.” ¹⁵

What matters here is that, as I mentioned several times, Fukuzawa behaves in a way that may be described as Franklinesque, not only because he was a major philosopher of the Enlightenment sympathizing with Unitarianism, but also because he is well known for promoting the idea of self-made man based on the post-Franklin/Jeffersonian theory of Emerson’s self-reliance. Take a glance at his bestselling book Gakumon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning ), published between 1872 and 1876, and you will quickly understand that without mentioning Franklin, Jefferson, or Emerson, he has clearly transplanted the spirit from the American Revolution through the Civil War into the modern Japanese soil. When he asserts that “in the pursuit of learning it is necessary that each person knows his capacity. We are born unrestricted and unbounded, and full-fledged men and women are free to act as they wish” and that “freedom and independence refer not only to the private self, but to the nation as well,” ¹⁶ it naturally conjures up Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837), in which the transcendentalist proposes that “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.” ¹⁷ For Emerson and Fukuzawa, scholarship helps achieve individual and national independence. One should also note here that Fukuzawa, born in 1835, has been compared with Mark Twain and the figure of the American self-made man.

However, in just the way Franklin’s idea of a self-made man paradoxically wound up with the production of man-made self, Fukuzawa in The Difference Engine promotes the idea of self-reliance and national independence and the creation of an artificial intelligence like the karakuri gynoid. In fact, since the 1990s, when the Modus in The Difference Engine becomes self-conscious, Keio University (which Fukuzawa established in the 1850s) has boasted of being the center of research on artificial intelligence in Japan. Deeply knowledgeable about the philosophies of Emerson and Fukuzawa as contemporaries, Gibson and Sterling very carefully re-create Fukuzawa as a post-Franklinian modernist.

The philosophical genealogy I have outlined will help you comprehend what happens in the final chapter, titled “MODUS: The Images Tabled.” As if explicating the mysterious title of the fifth and penultimate chapter, “The Fifth Iteration: The All-Seeing Eye,” the year 1991 in the novel witnesses the awakening of the steam-driven computer in London:

In this City’s centre, a thing grows, an autocatalytic tree, in almost-life, feeding through the roots of thought on the rich decay of its own shed images, and ramifying, through myriad lightning -branches, up, up, towards the hidden light of vision,

Dying to be born,

The light is strong,

The light is clear,

The Eye at last must see itself

Myself . . .

I see:

I see,

I see

I

! ¹⁸

Along with the Franklinian and Frankensteinian image of “lightning,” the awakening of the all-seeing “Eye,” that is, the steam-driven artificial intelligence, very naturally makes us rewind the history from Franklin through Emerson, whose major work Nature (1836) is well known for the following punchline: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” ¹⁹

The first chapter of Nature includes the following mysterious sentence: “If stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Without this sentence, Isaac Asimov, a major voice of hardcore science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, could not have come up with the idea for “Nightfall,” published in 1941. Without Emerson’s idea of transcendentalism inspired by Kant and Coleridge and crystallized in Nature , Friedrich Nietzsche could not have developed his theory of superman (Übermensch) mentioned in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), which inspired Arthur C. Clarke to write such masterpieces as Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Likewise, Emerson’s post-Unitarian transcendentalism induced even cyberpunk writers to create a brand-new paradigm of science fiction, in which the computer as the all-seeing eye occupies the place of the Universal being. While Franklinian self-made man was turned into man-made self, cyberpunkish man-made self is turned into the cyber-transcendentalist “all-seeing eye.” Herein lies a breakthrough in literary and cultural history. In conclusion, let me note that The Difference Engine continues to birth descendants, such as Project Itoh and Toe EnJoe’s collaboration The Empire of the Corpses (2009–2012) and Fumio Takano’s Sister of Karamazov (2012). Yet a reconsideration of this emergent subgenre of cyberpunk in the 2010s will be another story. ²⁰