Thrilling Tales: The Difference Engines (24x18") Poster

This is one of the illustrations for my online serial "The Lair of the Clockwork Book", at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Here we see the inventor Osgood Finnegan quite late in his career. He's standing in the middle of what he calls his Great Work, and it's safe to say that the Great Work involves a lot of computation - because the room's full to brimming with difference engines, along with plenty of other mechanical devices whose purpose is even less obvious. This version of the illustration is based on the one at the web site, and in the book, but has been re-rendered and overpainted in a much higher resolution even than the book's version: 300 pixels to the inch, at 18 by 24 inches.