Review by New York Times Review
IN THE LATE 1970s, a French computer scientist under contract to the United States Defense Department developed Ada, a programming language for military computer systems. Today the language is widely used in "safety critical" settings: in the military, in banks and nuclear power plants, in medical devices and air traffic control. Ada was named for the woman who has been called the world's first computer programmer, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52), daughter of Lord Byron. When she was a teenager, Lovelace met the engineer and inventor Charles Babbage, the designer of machines that are considered to be progenitors of today's computers. Their friendship and intellectual collaboration is the subject of Sydney Padua's "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage," initially published online as a comic strip, now expanded into a graphic novel. The book's images are in black and white. Padua depicts Babbage's machine, the Analytical Engine, as a clanging, sputtering steampunk contraption. It is a massive assemblage of gears and cogs, with spiral staircases and seemingly infinite internal corridors. Padua's figures have large round eyes and speak in gasps that end with exclamation points. Lovelace smokes a pipe and has a tiny waist. Babbage is oafish, with a square head and wavy hair. They scowl and grin like silent film stars. The drawn panels adhere to certain conventions of superhero comics. Sound effects are written in: "BANG! BANG!," "RRRROOAR!," "WHOOSH!" "TING!" The figures are often bathed in sharp, theatrical spotlights; their body language is exaggerated and elastic. In one scene, pairs of eyeballs peer out of the darkness. A preface provides a biographical sketch of Lovelace and Babbage. Padua then launches into what she calls the "Pocket Universe," a fictionalized realm where the two "live to complete the Analytical Engine, and naturally use it to HAVE THRILLING ADVENTURES AND FIGHT CRIME!!" The adventures, for the most part, are slapstick encounters with eminent Victorians who visit Babbage's workshop. The Duke of Wellington rides in on horseback, demanding Babbage and Lovelace help stabilize the global economy. Karl Marx makes a cameo. Dickens and George Eliot stop by, in a confusing episode with gags about cats and punch cards. Queen Victoria shows up, announcing: "We intend to DOUBLE the Engine's funding, as we perceive how useful it shall be in Our little scheme to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" The characters' speech frequently takes the form of quotations from their real-life published writings. This can make for awkward dialogue. At one point, Babbage shouts at Queen Victoria: "In mathematical science, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and the sailor!!!" Babbage and Lovelace toss around anachronistic tech terms like "beta test release" and "the Cloud!" Lovelace gets frustrated because Twitter hasn't been invented yet. Padua seems more absorbed by her footnotes than by the story itself. The bottom portions of most pages are overtaken by lengthy notes. (This creates a design issue: Pages without footnotes are left with a swath of blank white at the bottom, making them appear incomplete.) Each chapter also has a section for endnotes; some of the endnotes have additional footnotes. At the back of the book there are appendices - also footnoted. Padua herself is uneasy about the extent of the notes. She interrupts one endnote in midsentence: "Oh, geez, it's too complicated." Later she writes, "It's hard to know what sort of detail to cram into the footnotes." She chose to cram in a lot. In the notes, we learn about the history of flow charts and the naming of the planet Uranus. We learn about the origins of the British postal system. We learn about a 1980s thought experiment called "the Chinese Room." Much of this material is interesting, but it reads as a more or less unedited jumble. The impression it gives is that Padua was captivated by her research and couldn't bear to leave much out, however peripheral to the main story line. Eventually a reader must give up trying to follow a narrative and read "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" primarily as a miscellany of historical curiosities. The book has some inspired moments. Toward the end, Padua begins using visual puns to illustrate her themes. Lovelace draws a picture frame and walks through it into another dimension. She tumbles through space along an axis of imaginary numbers. She pokes at a calligraphic "0" and muses on the nature of zero: "Lying at the axis of everything," Padua explains, "zero is both real and imaginary. Lovelace was fascinated by zero;...it had a spiritual dimension." There is an intriguing book lurking here. Padua found a good story - her characters led fascinating lives - and she gestures toward big questions: What is the relationship between science and imagination? Was mathematics invented or discovered? But Padua has a habit of undermining herself and her project. She calls herself "The Lady Novelist,...Yours Truly the Indefatigable Footnoter." Such self-deprecating cracks - and there are many - fall flat. Worse, Padua extends the joke to her entire book: "Though I'm debatably a lady, my novel is beyond all debate extremely silly." Padua is right: Her book is silly. But it didn't have to be. She might have written a different book, even a funny one, that didn't insist on the triviality of the enterprise, reducing her characters and the history they inhabit to wacky caricature. In her last chapter, Padua throws up her hands: "In any case, you might as well say that neither Babbage nor Lovelace actually either invented the computer or programmed it. The Analytical Engine was never built, and our heroes, in the end, are just footnotes to history." These words, needless to say, appear in a footnote. Lovelace and Babbage have slapstick encounters with eminent Victorians. LAUREN REDNISS'S new book, "Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future," will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 7, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An audaciously imagined alternate history of the invention of the computerin 19th-century Victorian England.This graphic novel, written and illustrated by an artist and computer animator, begins with a sliver of factthe 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
