The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Starred review from January 26, 2015
This print edition of Padua’s webcomic is a must-have for anyone who enjoys getting lost in a story as brilliant in execution as conception. Padua's debut graphic novel transforms the collaboration between Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron) and Charles Babbage (a noted polymath) into an inspired, “What If?” story. Lovelace was a talented mathematician and helped translate a paper on Babbage’s ideas for an Analytical Engine, the world’s first computer. The notes she added to the translation were so cleverly detailed that experts today recognize them as the first example of computer programming. Although Lovelace died a few years later and Babbage was left to tinker with his Analytical Engine until his death, Padua imagines an alternate reality where they build the engine and use it to “have thrilling adventures and fight crime!” The immensity of Padua’s research and the wit and allusions of her prose are striking, saying as much about what drove her to explore the possibilities of her protagonists’ relationship as about the protagonists themselves. Permeated by delightful illustrations, obsessive foot- and endnotes, and a spirit of genuine inventiveness, it’s an early candidate for the year’s best.

February 15, 2015
An audaciously imagined alternate history of the invention of the computer-in 19th-century Victorian England.This graphic novel, written and illustrated by an artist and computer animator, begins with a sliver of fact-the brief, apparently unproductive "intellectual partnership" between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. She was 18 when they met, the daughter of Lord Byron, steered toward mathematics and science in order to avoid the irrationality and even madness of poetry and, in her words from the novel, "redeem my father's irrational legacy." He was a 42-year-old mathematics professor, "a super-genius inventor" according to the narrative, committed to developing "the radical non-human calculating machine." "In a sense the stubborn, rigid Babbage and mercurial, airy Lovelace embody the division between hardware and software," explains one of the voluminous footnotes (and endnotes) that take even more space than the graphic narrative. The historical version, such as it is, takes less than a tenth of the book, ending with Lovelace's death from cancer at age 36, having written only one paper, while Babbage "never did finish any of his calculating machines. He died at seventy-nine, a bitter man. The first computers were not built until the 1940s." Yet the historical account merely serves as a launching pad for the narrative's alternative history, as the "multiverse" finds the development of oversized, steam-driven computers, with huge gears and IBM-style punch cards. The "Difference Engine" that Babbage conceived and Lovelace documented was initially championed by Queen Victoria, and Padua develops an account that encompasses the literary development of Samuel Coleridge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Lewis Carroll. Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, readers can get lost in the explosion of imagery and overwhelming notes that document the history that never was. A prodigious feat of historically based fantasy that engages on a number of levels.

March 1, 2015
Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, while certainly pivotal in the development of modern computing, are sometimes relegated to mere footnotes to history, and in an enthusiastic play on that notion, Padua offers an entertaining comic adventure that is, humorously, mostly footnotes. Using their steam-powered Analytical Engine, the two characters go on to solve a financial collapse, entertain Queen Victoria, and free Victorian England of typos in popular fiction. The black-and-white panels, originally published as a webcomic, are full of cartoonish, dynamic action, and incorporate tongue-in-cheek jokes about the contemporary Internet (Queen Victoria, for instance, is completely enthralled by a cat pic). While the comics are occasionally overshadowed by the explanatory text, Padua inflects the vivacious notes with so many snippets of primary documents, instructions on how the Analytical Engine worked, and tidbits about real historical figures that it's hard not to get swept up in her zeal. Though there's enough higher-level math content that this might be best suited to readers already familiar with those concepts, fans of odd, overlooked historical figures will be delighted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

As the London-based author notes, her eponymous webcomic "started as a punchline to a one-shot comic--hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime?--has evolved into...well, a really really long punchline." James Gleick kindly brought this hilarity to the attention of Pantheon's editors, and a book was born--the publisher's biggest graphic novel.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015

Originally a webcomic, this collection of jests interweaves history, literature, and fantasy into short stories starring Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Babbage's machines, and a number of 19th-century luminaries. Fact: Lord Byron's mathematically minded daughter Ada and inventor-wannabe Charles were lifelong BFFs and collaborated on writings about the proto-computers that Charles wanted to build. Fiction: that either the "Difference Engine" or the "Analytical Engine" was actually built or helped the Victorian pair do battle with the banking system. Fortunately, London-based animator Padua doesn't let facts get in the way of steampunk, and she has a great deal of fun riffing verbally and visually on techno-math geekery. Notes, references, original documents, and amusing speculations intercut the drawings--you can read just the comic, follow the comic and supporting texts, or dip into the texts later. The black-and-white art delivers all the humorous vivacity of solid editorial cartooning when showing, for example, Ada climbing through machine innards with crowbar in hand and pipe in mouth. VERDICT Padua's extravaganza is very much for the whimsical intelligentsia and will speak to those interested in computers or math who will delight in the abundant background materials.--M.C.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.