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Sydney Padua

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer Hardcover – Illustrated, April 21 2015

by Sydney Padua (Author)

392 ratings

Part of: Pantheon Graphic Library (19 books)

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THE THRILLING ADVENTURES OF LOVELACE AND BABBAGE . . . in which Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures.

Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines.

But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible.

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

April 21 2015
Dimensions

18.85 x 3 x 26.11 cm
ISBN-10

0274811537
ISBN-13

978-0274811533
Lexile measure

1130L
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Product description

Review

James Gleick, author of The Information
“Don’t be fooled by the word ‘comic.’ Sydney Padua tells a story that is tender, passionate, and true.”

Charles Petzold, author of Code and The Annotated Turing
"So there. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is learned, clever, funny, and above all very silly in the best sense of the word."

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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.”

Martha Cornog, Library Journal
“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.”

Bookpage
“Sydney Padua’s impeccably researched, yet playfully imagined graphic biography is a treat for history buffs and graphic novel lovers alike…With fantastically detailed art, footnotes and diagrams…, this is a whimsical graphic account like no other.”

Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
“Reading The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is like auditing a dozen high-level, inventively taught college classes simultaneously: more than a little overwhelming yet fascinating.”

Etelka Lehoczky, NPR.org
“Sydney Padua’s new book is definitely ‘Yowza!’ material.”

Discover Magazine
“An outlandish, enlightening tale.”

Nancy Szokan, Washington Post
“Informative and entertaining . . . . It’s a book that makes you a lot smarter as it makes you laugh.”

The Takeaway
“Novelist Sydney Padua has found quite a pair: the girl with the unstoppable brain; the male inventor 24 years her senior, part-poet, part-genius; this Victorian odd couple, dedicated to crime foiling and cleverness, is easily worthy of Holmes and Watson with a title to match.”

Maria Popova, BrainPickings.org
“Immensely delightful and illuminating …a masterwork of combinatorial genius and a poetic analog to its subject matter.”

About the Author

SYDNEY PADUA is an animator and visual effects artist, usually employed in making giant monsters appear to be attacking people for the movies. She started drawing comics by accident and is still trying to figure out how to stop. Originally from the Canadian prairie, she now lives in London with her husband and far too many books. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is her first book.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0307908275
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; Illustrated edition (April 21 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0274811537
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0274811533
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 828 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 18.85 x 3 x 26.11 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #135,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #80 in Historical & Biographical Fiction Graphic Novels
- #251 in Literary Graphic Novels
- #355 in Biographical Historical Fiction

Customer Reviews:
392 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		81%
4 star		11%
3 star		5%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Bookworm

Delightful!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 6, 2015

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Absolutely charming! Despite always having been leery of graphic novels, an interest in Ada Lovelace compelled me to give this a try, and I am very happy that I did! In Sydney Padua's pocket universe, Ada does not die young, she lives on to have adventures with Charles Babbage. The art is lively, the endnotes are informative and witty, and it's obvious that the author has a great deal of research to create such an effective mix of fact and fiction. Even better: in this pocket universe, Jane Austen lives to 95 and writes dozens of novels-- page 156, so it must be true. A delight of a book.

One person found this helpful

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KathyO

Marvellous alchemy of geekery, art, history and humour

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 9, 2015

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The author manages an absolutely enchanting balance between the awe-inspiring intellectual, artistic and engineering advances of the Victorian age, and the innate hilarity of the personalities who populated it. I love her art, and I love her storytelling, and I love the rat-bag of historical odds, ends, gems and oddballs she brings to my attention along the way. I have only one regret -- this is not a complete collection of the comics she has created so far -- but if she'll publish the missing material in a companion volume, all is forgiven. (Hint hint, Ms. Padua...) A great gift for the Victorian history geek, computing geek, math geek and/or comics geek in your family...

One person found this helpful

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Robin Furr

not what I’d expected, but well worth it

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 29, 2022

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I had hoped that this book would have the collected webcomic in total - which it doesn’t, being (I believe) 100% new material. That said, it is a surprisingly informative text on Babbage and Lovelace, with a very much appreciated selection of original sources.

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JC

Too little fiction, too much research

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 22, 2019

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I was looking for a fiction book, a comic book. The fictional story is about 20% of the book and the rest of it is research. Not bad at all if that is what you are looking for, but I was looking for a fictional graphic novel. Maybe my bad...

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Digest

A steam-powered, full force, victorian intellectual romp

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 3, 2015

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This is a wonderful book. It is beautifully drawn and full of intelligent love for the various brilliances of Lovelace and Babbage. It is also -- in addition to being touching and entertaining -- extremely informative. I'd recommend it to anyone, but those with some knowledge of computing will get the most from it.

2 people found this helpful

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Dan Earle

A new experience in reading.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

This was very enjoyable to read and very informative. The style was quite unique with use of graphics and footnotes to tell the story. Also, a bit of imagination and creativity thrown in. Worth the read.

One person found this helpful

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Rico

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 16, 2015

Verified Purchase

How can anyone not love a book where the footnotes have footnotes. Full of charm and wit.

2 people found this helpful

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Forbes Hirsch

Lots of fun

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 19, 2015

Verified Purchase

imaginative and informative. Fabulous cartooning and surprising historical facts

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Top reviews from other countries

Tielhard

At a loss how to describe this wonderful comic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 24, 2020

Verified Purchase

This may be the most enjoyable comic I have read for a very very long time. I am just not sure how to describe it. It is definitely an historical investigation of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and the calculating engines Babbage concieved and Lovelace was inspired by to almost glimpse the potential of computing. It is a slapstick journey across a steam punk London that never was. It is also a popular science explanation of the unfullfilled dream of mechanical computation. On top of that there are some wonderfully silly vignettes of the mathematical and literary Victorians at thier most eccentric. Then of course there is Brunel as he never was but everyone thinks he was. The drawings of both the main characters, Lovelace and Babbage are charming and engaging but the best characters by far are Brunel, Eliott, Babbage's footman and Wellington's horse. Unless you are an organ grinder's monkey or a poet you should love this comic.

Susan Stepney

have thrilling adventures and fight crime

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

The tale of a Pocket Universe in which Lovelace and Babbage live to complete the Analytical Engine, and use it to have thrilling adventures and fight crime (the crimes of street music and poetry, that is).

This starts off as a relatively straightforward account of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the never-to-be-completed Analytical Engine, the famous programmable mechanical computer, told in lovely graphic novel format. But that real life story ends unhappily, and too soon (Lovelace died at the age of 36, and Babbage never completed his masterpiece).

Rather than the book stopping at page 40, the fictional story begins, in an alternate universe, where the laws of time are a little more fluid, the engine is completed, and the super-geniuses Babbage and Lovelace, agents of The Crown, team up to fight crime, meet Wellington and Brunel, banter about computers, and have thrilling steampunk adventures, all gloriously illustrated, and copiously footnoted.

Those footnotes are there to point out the links (sometimes tenuous, often not) between what is happening in the tales, and what happened in reality. There is a lot of research behind these brief tales, with some footnotes having endnotes of their own, with more copious material; and some of those endnotes have further footnotes of their own. These tell of the (real life) events behind the (sadly so very fictional) scenes being illustrated.

Sometimes a page of research is captured by a quick joke, or a single panel. But one whole story depends on it: the visitor who distracts Coleridge when writing Kubla Khan is none other than that destroyer of poetry, Lovelace herself! The evidence is convincingly presented; only one tiny detail argues against it, scrupulously recorded by the author: “Some may object that she was born eighteen years after the composition of the poem, but this anomaly is easily explained”.

Overall, this is a delight, especially if you are interested in the Analytical Engine, and the history behind it. The individual stories probably do not stand on their own, but when supported by triply-nested footnotes, and superb illustrations, everything comes together brilliantly.

2 people found this helpful

Kevin Trebell

Lovely and well presented vision of what might have been with two of the great minds of their age

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 26, 2015

Verified Purchase

I ordered this having seen some great reviews (and being reminded of it whilst watch a recent documentary on Ada).

I've known about Ada for many years and her huge importance in the formation of my industry alongside Babbage as this was my area of study (in fact one of the languages I learned to code in was named after her).

This book is a little different though, starting with the history of Ada and Babbage and their relationship but moving in to a fictional world where Ada did not die young and their adventures continued. It's wonderful in the way it visualises what might have been had these two brilliant minds finished their work.

The book is presented nicely, the cartoon artwork is lovely and the copious footnotes add a lot of depth to the book. It has also has a nice steampunk vibe to it, seeing the inventions of these two realised in a Victorian world.

Overall I love this and reckon it's a great read for those who want to learn a bit more about them or who just want a fun read.

One person found this helpful

J. Shanks

Loved it!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is an odd hybrid of a book. It quite happily mixes fact and fiction with liberal smatterings of "celebrities" of the day (Queen Victoria, Brunel, Marian "George Eliot" Evans, Charles "Lewis Carroll" Dodgson, Wellington, Dickens, etc.). There are lots of lengthy footnotes, endnotes and a few other pages of text which may be off-putting to to some graphic novel/comic book readers, but the cartoon elements may likewise deter "serious" readers. However, neither party should be put off as, whilst there are extensive notes, which impart a lot of facts, they are in-keeping with the humour of the comic strips and everything is lovingly joined together by Sydney Padua who has clearly enjoyed her research and has a genuine affection for her lead protagonists. The art is quite lovely and the writing is to a high standard. Even the binding is praiseworthy! No prior knowledge of the subject matter is required to enjoy this rip-roaring romp where you can even have fun learning along the way!

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A very effective combination of cartooning and history.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

Don't buy this expecting it just to be a "comic"! Yes, the drawings are fantastic and full of "artistic licence" but there is an awful lot of interesting history and information in the footnotes. You can learn at lot AND be entertained at the same time, which is what a good book is all about. As others have commented, the binding of the hardback is superb and has a quality, "period" feel to it. If you have any interest in this subject area at all you will appreciate this book. And I mean "book", this is one of those occasions where the Kindle format would just not do it any justice at all.

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Sydney Padua

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