Wired Victorians

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Coleman, Dawn

Clayton also argues cogently for the value of historical fiction as an alternative to orthodox historiography-a challenge to linear narrative and a means of illustrating how the present continually reinvents the significance of the past. Besides analyzing reinterpretations of nineteenth-century science and engineering in such undisputedly literary works as Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Clayton draws on an impressive familiarity with science fiction to demonstrate the serious cultural work of novels such as Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (1999). Situating The Difference Engine, in which the construction of Babbage's Analytical Engine inaugurates the computer age nearly a century before its time, within the science fiction subgenre of "alternative history" or "parallel worlds," Clayton moves beyond the typical valorization of the novel as metafiction to reflect on how the parallel worlds subgenre "raises anachronism, in the literal sense of something out of its proper time, into a methodological principle" (113). He rescues this subgenre from charges of escapism by citing its precedent in British Romanticism, in which anachronism, or temporal manipulations including "medievalism, nostalgia, prophecy, [and] apocalypse" (113), effected social and political critique. Sci-fi anachronism has this potential as well when it abides by certain principles, such as offering creative perspectives on the contemporary world and showcasing forgotten historical actors. Reading Cryptonomicon, which is structured around the parallel plots of World War II code breakers and their literal and figurative descendants in the 1990s who are trying to start an unusually idealistic IT company, Clayton traces how the two plots produce both the pleasure of historical repetition and a sense of the uncanny because of the silence surrounding the all-too-meaningful Cold War years that divide them.

For Clayton, the creative, irreverent hacker culture represented in Cryptonomicon also exemplifies a practical interdisciplinarity that augurs the convergence of the sciences and the humanities, or a return of sorts to the heady, pre-disciplinary culture of the early nineteenth century. In fact, he declares that we already inhabit such a world-"We live in an undisciplined culture again" (194)-and adduces by way of support both the necessary versatility of today's knowledge workers and, more tellingly, the example of a computer whiz who identifies with David Copperfield, an illustration drawn from Jon Katz's Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho (2000). Although Clayton maintains that he is primarily interested in how disciplines are converging in the professional sphere, it is this image of a computer geek reading a nineteenth-century novel that he seems to find most captivating and that underscores the most urgent idea in the book's final chapter, which is that literary culture still matters in a high-tech world. It is a touching faith given that Americans read less now than ever before and that techies and literary types often inhabit vastly different subcultures. But even if most scientists and engineers remain blissfully ignorant of the creative and critical resources available in literary culture and most humanists regard discussions of genomics and computer hacking with the wariness of the uninitiated, Dickens in Cyberspace successfully illuminates how the two cultures are already speaking to one another in a complex dialogue mediated by historical consciousness.