You may feel the effort would have been a waste of time and money. I,
reading this book, thought wistfully: ‘What went wrong?’ Although The Mars
Project is more of an engineering specification than a visionary work, it
leaves us with a taste of what might have been, and may still be.

It is rare for a museum exhibit to be a research project, for the exhibit
to have been designed 150 years ago is unique.

Making the Difference is an exhibition celebrating the birth, 200 years
ago, of Charles Babbage, the man who has only recently been recognised as
a pioneer of digital computing. The exhibition itself is dwarfed by the
glistening 3-tonne bulk of Difference Engine No. 2.

Planned but never built by Babbage, the engine would have been the most
advanced calculator of its time, aimed at producing accurate reference tables
using the difference method for resolving polynomial expressions. Lack of
finance and other factors led to it never being built, although its less
accurate predecessor, Difference Engine No. 1, was partially realised.

Using Babbage’s original plans, the Science Museum has spent £295
000 and taken a year to assemble this massive device, which would have been
the most complex machine of its time. The machine is more than a specimen:
it is an important piece of historical research.

Like many people, I have always accepted the conventional wisdom that
Babbage’s projects were unrealisable due to the engineering limitations
of the time. The Science Museum argues that this is a patronising view,
and that other factors prevented their creation. To prove this, the museum
has built the engine to tolerances no better than the engineering of the
1840s.

It will take some months before we know whether this view is right.
The engine certainly turns smoothly enough – it was demonstrated as a whole
for the first time at the press preview, accompanied by some understandable
nervousness on the part of the builders (anyone who has run untested software
on a modern computer will understand). It will take some time before it
can be shown that the engine possesses the reliability that Babbage claimed
for it.

To appreciate the engine, it must be seen turning. If you are unlucky,
and it is not running, there’s plenty to look at in the rest of the exhibition.
The fragment of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which would have been the first
true computer, is there, as is Difference Engine No. 1. But beside the new-minted
intricacy of the second engine, these seem mere pieces of historical driftwood.

I can understand how H. G. Wells, writing after Babbage’s death, and
after other, cruder, Difference Engines had been completed, could conceive
of moving through the fourth dimension using a purely mechanical contrivance.
Difference Engine No. 2 is a true time machine, a visitor from an era of
cams, cogs, rods and levers, of steel, bronze and cast iron. It may well
show us that our own sense of superiority over the Victorians is mere historical
parochialism.

* Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD. Tel: 071-938 8080/8008. Entrance
to the Science Museum costs £3.50 for an adult, £1.75 for
a child but is free from 4.30 to 6 pm.

Fin Fahey is a technical journalist. He also writes software.

The aftermath of any war is terrible but the events following the Gulf
War seem hideously out of proportion to the original issues. How has the
conflict affected the cool, clinical world of military theory, where civilian
losses are ‘collateral damage’ and the highest virtue an artefact can possess
is summed up in that catch-all word, ‘lethality’?

The Ultimate Weaponry, a slickly produced volume that looks, and sometimes
reads, like a user manual for Armageddon disguised as a coffee-table book,
might be expected to provide some answers. The author’s viewpoint, as a
former lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst,
keeps all that glittering hardware firmly in its place. The bottom line
in any conflict still seems to be the same ‘poor bloody infantry’, as ever
doggedly taking and holding ground (though these days chauffeured around
at high speed while sweating themselves to death in their antibiological
and chemical warfare, or ABC, suits).

This book, however, was put together before the war unfolded. All the
stars are there, from the reputedly pernickety Challenger main battle tank
to the ferocious Apache assault helicopter. Their theoretical capabilities,
logistical needs, tactical roles and much more are spelt out clearly with
little jargon; the book even employs an engaging ‘look-and-learn’ format
with lots of copy in tinted boxes, clear diagrams and excellent photos.
Best of all, it asks questions. Each chapter ends with a box summarising
the pros and cons of a given weapon system. We are invited, for example,
to consider whether or not the helicopter has revolutionised warfare or
whether the tank is dead.

Therein lies the rub. I’ve no doubt that the author, and military theoreticians
everywhere, had hoped that the Gulf War would answer some of these questions.
After all, the basic theory behind conventional warfare has not really been
put to the test since 1945. Astronomical sums are spent, in our names, on
complex systems some of which, when tried, might well turn out to be a dangerous
waste of time and money.

To my mind, not one of the questions in this book has received an answer.
The massed NATO weaponry went straight through the army of a Third World
country like, in one commentator’s words, ‘a buzzsaw through butter’. The
best one can say is that the technology worked, something of a surprise
in its own way.

The trouble is that the fundamental issues of tank versus infantry,
the trade off between vulnerability and mobility of the helicopter, the
relative power of modern artillery and so on, can only be settled in one
place in the modern world. That is on the Northern European plain between
two opponents with approximate parity in weapons and motivation. Which should
leave us wondering just how badly we want the answers.

There is little feeling in The Ultimate Weaponry for the enormous human
toll that even a small-scale conventional war can exact when fought with
modern weaponry, yet it stops short of actively celebrating technowar. As
a cool, lucid summary of the technical issues underlying modern military
thought, it can be recommended.

Fin Fahey is a technical writer.

For A literature of the future, science fiction often displays a galling
technological conservatism. Slide rules, wavering needles on dials and radiation-induced
telepathic mutants all contrived to continue hanging out on starship bridges
back when microcomputers and LED/LCD watches could be bought in Boots, the
good Dr Rhine’s experiments using dice and cards to prove that telepathy
or telekinesis existed were shown to be worth as much as a one million credit
note drawn on the Bank of Rigel and hard gamma was known to be much more
likely to give you a non-metaphorical lump in the throat than any kind of
strange mental powers. Science fiction has almost always suggested that
all societies, human or alien, can and will ultimately develop a technology
that looks quite a lot like ours.

William Gibson, author of the seminal Neuromancer, and the vociferously
polemical Bruce Sterling entered the struggle against science fiction’s
chronic tendency towards ossification in the late 1970s with their championship
of cyberpunk, a heady cocktail of computing, neurology and genetic engineering
set in a post-Cold War world populated by streetwise embittered ‘shabbies’-no
superheroes here.

Cyberpunk’s biggest achievement may have been in its writing off the
Cold War a decade before the official ending, but of late the subgenre itself
looks more and more sclerotic. Later imitators have not matched the original
high standards. Cyberpunk has tended towards self-parody.

The Difference Engine sees Gibson and Sterling abandoning formal cyberpunk,
but firmly back on the attack. The book is set in a 19th century, but not
the one we know. The divergence begins in the 1820s, when Radical lords
led by Byron enter and, in 1830, capture government, effectively abolishing
the old class system, and introducing a meritocracy led by scientists and
technologists. The eponymous engine is the mechanical computing machine
planned by Charles Babbage in our Universe but never constructed. As Lord
Babbage, however, he has not merely built the machine, but it has become
the foundation of Britain’s continuing Industrial Revolution, based on mechanical
information technology. Like the electronic computer, it is also a potent
tool in the hands of bureaucracies.

From this scenario, the authors spin a tapestry of pastiche and possibility,
enriched with enticing side alleys and throwaway speculations. But at the
core is one theme-indeterminacy. This gives the book its attacking edge.
The authors haul in an armoury of intellectual tools borrowed from (our)
20th century science, from chaos theory to Stephen Jay Gould’s puzzling
fossils, with quantum indeterminacy naturally lurking in the background.
It was, after all, John Wheeler, a quantum physicist, who gave some respectability
to the idea of alternate history.

Using these tools, The Difference Engine suggests that science fiction
in particular, as well as much of our general thinking, is inevitably compromised
by determinist notions now obsolete. The technology on which our society
is based followed a path dictated by the development of electromechanical
devices by James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi and others.
Science fiction assumes it always comes out that way. But then so did Karl
Marx and Vladimir Lenin-and so do all contemporary Western notions of development.

Gibson and Sterling speculate that this idea may be mere hindsight.
In a brief look ahead to an alternate 1991, the great mechanical wheels
not only still spin-they have overpowered London, reducing people to ciphers.
Not only another technology, but an alternate set of political developments
have suppressed our familiar electronics for good. There is no comfort for
deep greens in this-a world based on purely mechanical contrivances is a
grimy one indeed.

The book also tilts at our comforting ideas of 19th-century Britain.
It is often reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s Victorian pasticherie at its
best, but is not anywhere as comforting as Moorcock-or Charles Dickens,
come to that (it puzzles me how cosy we find Dickens’s descriptions of crushing
urban poverty). This is a bleak 19th century, not because of poverty, although
that exists, but more because many of the familiar events and images that
make up our world-view have never come into being. Coupled with this, our
famous 20th-century anomie and alienation have made their appearance a century
too early. The protagonists often seem to be dwarfed by the great grinding
wheels of the difference engines. When they do come alive it is often in
action scenes reminiscent of G. A. Henty’s Edwardian novels for boys.

This rich fruitcake of a book,is by turns bleak, funny, and challenging.
The Difference Engine is by a long way my favourite science fiction novel
of the past few months. With it, the two US authors have wiped the intellectual
smirk off the face of British science fiction.

Fin Fahey is a programmer and writer.

If science fiction’s greatest triumph of prophecy was space travel,
then its biggest missed bet must be the rise of the digital computer. As
late as the 1970s, some American science fiction stories still featured
earnest young men fingering slide rules (‘slipstick jockies’), while British
authors tended to ignore the subject completely. Even when the realisation
came that here was a technology that was about to alter everyday life irrevocably,
and not always for the better, the computer was all too often merely a prop,
the equivalent of a ‘blaster’ or the much-loved ‘hyperspace drive’.

In the US, the rise of cyberpunk put computers centre stage. A frequently
misunderstood sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk authors such as William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling extrapolated the future of the microchip into
a world where the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and
nonhuman become provisional and illusionary.

British authors, sunk in post-imperial gloom, have always tended to
take a more dystopic view of a future driven by technology, as Digital Dreams
shows clearly. This is a collection of stories by 20 British authors based
on computers.

The general mood is one of mistrust, although some stories reveal a
fascination with the world of computer viruses and ‘worms’, perhaps because
this contains the idea of contamination, an increasingly common topic in
an AIDS-obsessed society. Among these something-nasty-in-the-plasticwork
stories lurks David Langford’s ‘What happened at Cambridge IV’, which invokes
the spectre of killer computer graphics, a recurring theme of recent stories.
(In the 1930s there was a similar vogue for tales of books that could drive
men mad.

More enjoyable is Neil Gaiman’s ‘Virus’, a tale of the ultimately addictive
computer game. A pleasant story by Ben Jeapes dares to suggest that computer
viral forms may eventually develop their own ecology and, indeed, that some
may have to become protected species.

Gary Kilworth’s piece of whimsy, on the other hand, has God’s grand
design for the cosmos corrupted by the introduction of a viral soul. David
Barrett concentrates on a malicious author of a virus, an ultimately pathetic
figure totally dependent on his machine. I share his curiosity about why
people spend so much time trying to sabotage other people’s microcomputers.

But the collection does reiterate cliches that were old before the first
transistor flipped its flop. Josephine Saxton and Michael Fearn knock out
vers ions of E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, which originally warned
about excessive dependence on machines. That the machines are digital adds
nothing to the original thesis.

The characters in Keith Robert’s piece are tiresome stereotypes – the
passionate impulsive artist opposes the cold, unfeeling computer technician
who wishes to render all creativity down to zeros and ones. I am sure that
plot has been run and run for every type of technology there is.

I found much to be enjoyed in this collection, nonetheless. Besides
lightweight pieces of candyfloss like Ray Girvan and Steve Jones’s ‘Lord
of the Files’ and Andy Sawyer’s ‘Mechanical Art’, there is the excellent
Terry Pratchett story ‘# ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’. This is the
first piece of science fiction I have read that tackles the issue of ‘virtual
reality’, in which a computer generated world substitutes for reality.

Pratchett takes the idea beyond the crude goggles-and-glove approach
to a world in which you can choose to wear a virtual reality suit to edit
out all the nastiest features of everyday life. This makes it the only really
up-to-the-minute piece in the anthology.

Although this collection has its sparkling moments, it is surprisingly
short on insights, literary or technical, into the impact of information
technology on everyday life, in particular the convergence of communications
and computing that will increasingly define the way we look at the world.
Instead, with the exception of the Pratchett and a few other stories, Digital
Dreams has an oddly dated feel to it. An advance on cyberpunk, it isn’t.

Fin Fahey is a programmer and writes for computer journals.

VIDEO ART poses as many difficulties with definition as it does in execution.
The form lies on the triple point between fine art, film-making and technology,
with confusing inputs from the worlds of advertising and pop promos.

Such a clash of cultural tectonic plates might be expected to throw
up whole mountain ranges of creativity, but all too often the result has
been a series of tiny molehills – single-minded pieces devoid of either
entertainment value, artistic merit or true innovation. It is hard to be
sure whether this has been due to the limited vision of the artists, or
the intractable nature of the technology.

My expectations of video have over the years become extremely low, and
I faced Camden Council’s Viewing Figures with some trepidation. This 1990
Video Festival appears at the newly done up Camden Arts Centre. Instead
of predictability, however, I was rewarded with a series of pleasant surprises.

Most of the pieces on show are multi-screen installations, and this
certainly helps. Single screen pieces can only invite invidious comparisons
with the more traditional uses of moving pictures. Most of us have learned
a ‘vocabulary’ of television and film as we grew up so that automatically
we slice and dice within our nervous systems anything that we see on a screen
to fit it into this view of the world.

Using multiple screens breaks the web of associations, however, and
allows the viewer to deal with a piece in its own right. I found the most
effective example of this to be Marty St James’s and Anne Wilson’s video
portrait of dancer Shobana Jeyasingh. This uses 14 screens in a cruci form
arrangement and depicts Jeyasingh performing in the Bharatha Naryam style
of Madras, southern India.

Each of the 14 screens was filmed in a separate take, and the effect
is to break up the dance into a sequence of closely observed conventional
gestures, sometimes integrating the body across more than one screen, sometimes
fragmenting into different patterns.

I found the effect is hypnotic, although the work never allows the viewer
to slip into an easy television-watching trance. The portrait also powerfully
highlights the mimetic aspect of Indian dance.

Marty St James also has four smaller single-screen video ‘portraits’
in the show. These attempt to subvert the viewer’s preconceptions, but this
time the medium under attack is the conventional still portrait. Particularly
effective here is a ‘still’ of a laughing woman that surprises the watcher
by suddenly breaking into life.

A more conventional, though technically more complex, layout is used
by German artist Maria Vedder for her video wall piece Shut Up. Video walls
have been extensively used for advertising and promotion, but their potential
as installations has never been exploited.

The video wall layout consists of 25 monitors in a square matrix, with
supporting VCRs, and the hub of the whole unit, which is a computer sequencer
based on a personal computer. Each screen can show its own image, or it
can be used as one segment of a larger picture.

Shut Up is considerably more engaging than a simple description suggests.
Ostensibly a heavy-handed allegory depicting Hermes, the messenger god,
being made redundant by modern communications represented by fleets of paper
aeroplanes, it succeeds at the level of pure spectacle.

Vedder pushes the video wall to the limits, exposing a few flaws in
the technology in the process.

Shimmering star fields contrast with Vedder’s deliberately tacky images
of paper aeroplanes. These fly around the edge of the fields and break up
as their images pass from monitor to monitor. Vedder suggests they show
the disintegration of modern communication.

Vedder’s other work on show, Sparkle and Fire, is a more restricted
piece, consisting of five screens in a line. In it, she plays with the traditional
elements of alchemy. In some ways, I found it is more successful than Shut
Up, eschewing narrative meaning, and making a direct appeal to the senses.

Multi-screen video art is a form with an unpredictable future, for surely,
like the dream of low-temperature super conductors, industry will some day
realise the ideal of a true single-screen ‘video wall’. I found it heartening
to see artists using technology that is past its sell-by date in a thought-provok
ing fashion.

* Viewing Figures: The 1990 Camden Video Festival is at the Camden Arts
Centre, Arkwright Road, London NW3, until October 21. Admission is free.

Fin Fahey is a freelance computer and arts journalist.

Some of the fault was undeniably with the games, and the hardware (Uncle
Clive, take note). Computer games are still associated in most people’s
minds with one specimen – Space Invaders, which is now almost 15 years old.

In such early arcade games, life was nasty, brutish and short. This
was for a good reason, since the principle behind the design of arcade games
is to extract as many coins from the player in as little time as possible.
It is a pity, since games designed specifically for computer users actually
predate these offspring of the arcades. Enter the 1990s, and the wheel turns
once again.

Behind the scenes, a quiet revolution in computer game design has been
going on. It has all been made possible by the new generation of home micros,
which have more memory and speed than an early 1970s mainframe. Commodore’s
Amiga, for one, sports a memory with a minimum of 512K, and performs many
tasks. It also has a fast graphics coprocessor that is a game designer’s
dream. Playing an arcade game on such a machine is like ordering a doner
kebab at the Savoy.

The new games are not aimed at young children, or even teenagers. They
require concentration, inventiveness and persistence to play, and that also
offer months of playing time. Many of them seem calculated to appeal to
adults with an overweening interest in science. This is a welcome development
to anyone sick of the Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings cliches
prevalent in adventure games.

A fairly random scan of new games released this spring makes the point.
Two of the games mention Albert Einstein – Ross Goodley’s extraordinary
Gravity, and the weird and wonderful E-motion. Gravity is an interstellar
strategy game that pits you and your fleet of robot ships against the incomprehensible
Outies, who are either utterly villainous or merely misunderstood. Either
way, they are intent on turning most of the stars in the Galaxy into black
holes. What makes the game of interest is that the playing ‘field’ consists
of a representation of Einstein-Minkowski four-dimensional space, which
means that piloting your craft becomes a matter of relativistic billiards.
The Outies, of course, are changing the curvature of space all the time
by deepening the gravity wells.

Gravity is not an easy game to get the hang of – I found it slow to
respond and a little cluttered, probably because the author has been extremely
ambitious. It is a nice try, though, and the author has put in a serious
effort in getting the astrophysics right.

E-motion sports a baffled-looking Albert E. on its packaging. I don’t
blame him. This is one of those confusingly simple games. All you have to
do is bash together pairs of balls of the same colour to make them disappear.
Unfortunately, if they hit other coloured balls then new balls are generated,
which can lead to all sorts of runaway chain reactions. To make matters
worse, some of the balls are linked by elastic strands, so predicting their
behaviour is difficult. It takes very careful experimentation to get anywhere
with this one.

Scientific method also helps out in Pete Cooke’s excellent Tower of
Babel. This game is a series of puzzles that uses consistent elements depicted
in three dimensions. You control three robots who can modify the game layout,
for example, by moving a block from one square to the next. Using simple
elements, complex patterns of cause and effect can be set up. It requires
careful thought to predict the likely consequences of even the simplest
act.

Tower of Babel is a real joy to play. It has a genuine physical feel
to it that sucks you into the game universe. Best of all, it comes complete
with a software ‘kit’ that allows you to construct your own brain-teasers.

I had some difficulty in getting out of the game universe in Interphase.
Loosely based on William Gibson’s seminal science-fiction novel Neuromancer,
the game plays tricks with reality as seen through the filter of computers.
Ostensibly the game problem is straightforward: you have to break through
a series of security gates to steal back a deadly subliminal entertainment
tape. You can, however, experience reality only via the coded representations
in the security software. This causes ethical dilemmas – could you bring
yourself to destroy a security ‘droid that appeared to be a unicycling frog?

Soft scientists will be glad to know that physics and computer science
are not the only fields to get a look in. Knights of the Crystallion is
billed as being a ‘culture simulator’, a wonderful idea that should appeal
to anthropologists everywhere. In this, you are one of the Orodrim, a curious
people who live inside the skeletal remains of a long-dead behemoth. The
main game breaks down into a number of subgames, in which you learn the
nature of the Orodrim economy by striving to keep your clan alive, play
mind-improving games and search for crystal eggs. Although some of the elements
of the game are a little lightweight, I enjoyed the implicit questioning
of our cultural assumptions.

There are plenty of trading games on the market, but they all work on
the basis of individual profit. In Knights of the Crystallion, it is the
well-being of the collective that you, as clan leader, are seeking to preserve.

Most of the game manual for Mike Singleton’s Midwinter consists of a
minutely detailed climatological report, complete with diagrams. Singleton,
rather perversely, sets up an apocalyptic scenario in which humanity has
been almost wiped out by global cooling – he is a fan of the nuclear winter
scenario. However, his reasoning is scientifically impeccable (if you are
prepared to accept the odd blunder, such as the assertion that the Sahara
lies on the equator), involving the emission of so much volcanic dust that
the natural equivalent of a nuclear winter occurs. The science here is,
I suspect, simply a rationale to justify Singleton’s love of snow-shrouded
landscapes, but I appreciated his gesture in appealing to the player’s intelligence.

The game itself is probably the most effective guerrilla warfare simulation
I have seen, and is set in an incredibly detailed fractal-generated landscape
(I am surprised we have not seen more of Mandelbrot’s monstrous offspring
in computer games). For purposes of hang-gliding, the game even models the
patterns of thermals you might expect over raised terrain.

Midwinter takes a lot of brow-furrowing. You cannot win the game by
brute force, instead you succeed by winning people over to your cause and
by careful strategic planning. Considering the upsurge of science-oriented
games, ecological issues seem poorly served at the moment, but this does
not look like lasting. Chris Crawford, who is possibly the most revered
simulation programmer in the business, has produced a new program called
Balance of The Planet, that Accolade will distribute in two weeks’ time.
The game will focus on trying to organise global responses to environmental
threats.

That may sound just a little worthy for a game, but if it is anything
like Crawford’s Balance of Power it will not be dull. This is probably the
most intelligent ‘entertainment’ simulation in existence. In it, you can
play either of the two superpowers. The object, however, is not primarily
to dominate the world, but to avoid war.

While attempting to maintain the peace, you are forced to come to terms
with the perception that the computer player builds up of your actions.
Dangerous crises can occur because of misplaced perceptions on either side.
This has a good historical precedent in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and playing
this game is an illuminating experience. It is a shame in some ways that
Crawford’s masterpiece is being overtaken by the imminent demise of one
of the real-life players . . .

By being able to model both exotic and everyday scientific and social
realities, computer gaming is throwing off its patina of genre cliche. Much
so-called ‘educational’ software in this country seems calculated to put
children off computers for life. I feel that true education lies in being
able to inform and entertain, and that’s just what many of these games do.

All prices are for 16-bit disc versions.

Interphase: Mirrorsoft/Imageworks, Irwin House, 118 Southwark Street,
London SE1 0SW Tel: 071-583 3494. Atari ST/Amiga/PC Pounds sterling 24.99.
Gravity: as above. Atari ST/Amiga Pounds sterling 24.95.

Midwinter: Microprose/Maelstrom, Unit 1, Hampton Road Industrial Estate,
Tetbury, Glos GL8 8LD Tel: (0666) 504326. Atari ST/Amiga/IBM PC Pounds sterling
29.99.

Tower of Babel: Microprose Atari ST/Amiga 24.99.

E-motion: US Gold/Assembly Line, Units 2/3, Holford Way, Holford, Birmingham
B6 7AX Tel: (021) 625 3388. Atari ST/Amiga/IBM PC Pounds sterling 24.99.
Knight of the Crystallion: as above. Amiga Pounds sterling 39.99.

Balance of Power: Mindscape import available at retailers, or from the
distributors Viztrade, PO Box 1019, Lewes, East Sussex BN8 4DW. Atari ST/Amiga/Mac
Pounds sterling 24.99.

Fin Fahey is a software programmer and writes on computing.