Used. Mass Market Paperback. When William Gibson and Bruce Sterling put their brilliant heads together in 1890—wait, no, 1990—they didn't just write a book; they practically single-handedly stoked the steam-powered boilers of an entire literary genre. This alternate 1855 London swaps out top hats and cholera for punched cards and cybernetic calculating engines, leaving Charles Babbage’s silicon dreams fully realized a century early. It follows a disgraced Luddite’s daughter, an intrepid paleontologist, and a diplomatic spy as they chase a deadly box of mysterious data down the cobblestones. It's a deliciously dense historical thriller that proves the Victorian era would have been infinitely cooler with code.