The Difference

Yesterday was a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of a day. I’ve just started reading The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez and one question, one 'the fuck keeps leading to another.

In the radioactively polluted Empire City, humans develop all kinds of anomalies (extra arms, three foot tall foreheads, telekinesis, precognition, etc.), animals can become more human than people (e.g., a gorilla with a thirst for Jane Austen novels) and robots who experience the Freewill “Glitch.” Mack Megaton is that sort of bot.

Even in Empire City, a town where weird science is the hope for tomorrow, it's hard for a robot to make his way. It's even harder for a robot named Mack Megaton, a hulking machine designed to bring mankind to its knees. But Mack's not interested in world domination. He's just a bot trying to get by, trying to demonstrate that he isn't just an automated smashing machine, and to earn his citizenship in the process. It should be as easy as crushing a tank for Mack, but some bots just can't catch a break. (source) 

This is a total can’t-put-it-down, hard boiled robot detective, page turner.

Early on there’s a reference to a “difference engine.” 

…sometimes being logical meant going against the odds. So I shut down my difference engine and headed for the door.

 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s book The Difference Engine came to mind first. I’ve not read it YET (I KNOW? What’s up with THAT!?). Next up, was me wondering ’the hell IS a Difference engine anyway?

Difference engines are strictly calculators. They crunch numbers the only way they know how - by repeated addition according to the method of finite differences. (source) 

It was invented by Charles Babbage in the early 19th century. Babbage – mathematician, philosopher, inventor, mechanical engineer and all around brilliant dude – has been referred to as the father of computers

Also too:

…he invented the cowcatcher, reformed the British postal system, and was a pioneer in the fields of operations research and actuarial science. It was Babbage who first suggested that the weather of years past could be read from tree rings. He also had a lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls (automatons). (source)

Our hero, Mack Megaton’s difference engine is his brain. //duh//

One of the things I totes LURV about all the Martinez books that I’ve read to date, is that there’s always at least one fully realized, strong (emotionally and/or physically or BOTH), believable female character. (like Constance Verity and her BFF Tia). In The Automatic Detective, the tremendous+ chick is Lucia Napier. She’s mindbendingly gorgeous, beyond wealthy AND an absoBRILL inventor/scientist. Oh and she’s a total flirt.

‘scuse me now, I’ve got coffee to slurp and a book to get back to.

It was one of the marks of sentience, the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy and still indulge in fantasy. In other words: I lied, therefore I thought.~ A. Lee Martinez, The Automatic Detective