/lit/ - Literature

Let me know if I'm retarded, but I just finished this and I'm trying to figure it out.
The Difference Engine, at the end, has become if not a singularity then at least self aware and is working through how that happened. It became self aware thanks to some mathematical program on the Engine cards that self-analyses. The cards travel Mick Radley, Sybil, some Frenchman and into the Napoleon Computer or whatever it was called and wreck it, then Captain Swing gets them, then Ada Byron, who hands them off to Mallory who hides them in the Brontosaurus skull. Then they're stolen again, but Oliphant gets them back and Keats winds up running them in the English system.
HOWEVER
Most of the book isn't related to this at all and just seems like an excuse to try (badly) to use Victorian slang and expressions and worldbuild some alt-history. Didn't like it, would not recommend.

>look up at the halfway point of a novel (3 chapters, nearly 200 pages)
>barest hints of a larger plot
This is wild. There's only so much of Mallory wandering around alt-London and being beset by thugs that I can take.
On a different note, is there any fantasy akin to The Last Samurai, where new or foreign technology is brought in and decimates the traditional warrior people who refuse to adapt?