Charles Babbage
Inventor of the Difference Engine and the world’s first computer, which he calls the Analytical Engine. These inventions significantly alter the course of the Victorian Era which allows for the plot to develop along its lines of advanced technology ushering in the age what would come to be known as literary genre called Steampunk. The alteration of progressive advancement has far-reaching consequences which seriously transforms the historical timeline of this actual historical figure.
Sybil Gerard
Daughter of a controversial and executed anti-technology Luddite, Sybil Gerard is also based upon a historical personage of a sort: she originated as a character in a novel written former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Sybil’s motivational drive is fueled by a sense of revenge against those who led to her father’s execution, among which is noted Romantic poet Lord Byron.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace actually was the daughter of Lord Byron, but attained her own niche in history as a result of her own authenticated interest in computer. In fact, her research would lead her to become popularly regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. The relationship between their fathers bring Ada and Sybil into conflict, but Ada will go on to deliver a groundbreaking lecture what became known as Gödel's incompleteness theorems in another example of the novel’s playful tweaking of the actual historical timeline to conform to its own fictionalized repurposing.
Karl Marx
The father of communism and author of Das Kapital here takes a very unusual turn into alternative history. The United States has collapsed into a series of smaller nation-states (including the survival of the Confederacy) of which one is a Manhattan Island which has fallen under the rule of communism. Marx is identified as the founder of the Commune.
