Reviews

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

eliza_bangert's review

4.0

I couldn't make it through all the appendices, but the rest was very interesting!

quietdomino's review

3.0

This book perfectly captures all the hilarious and odd things that come out of the Victorian archives, but seems to have rather a lot of footnotes for the civilian non-specialist.

cranea653's review

5.0

A bit technical in parts, but a fun and enlightening read overall.

balletbookworm's review

5.0

I'd give it 5 stars simply for the complicated drawings Sydney Padua did of the Engine in the Appendix.

Beyond that, this is a lovely biography-cum-steampunk crime-fighting duo tale complete with a chapter involving George Eliot. And GREAT footnotes.

weltenkreuzer's review

5.0

Wilde und zutiefst nerdige Geschichten über die beiden Erfinder*innen des ersten Computers - zumindest theoretisch.

mariesreads's review

4.0

This was so much fun! Very smart and witty, and the art is incredibly expressive and action-packed. I enjoyed the footnotes and endnotes, as well. Padua's passion for the subject really comes across, as does the affectionate and respectful friendship between Lovelace and Babbage.

aga_acrobat's review

5.0

If you loath footnote, or endnotes, or any other kind of sprawling notes for that matter, do not read this book. You will not like it.
Or maybe you will find an endless obsession with books with sprawling notes. You‘ll never know.

Warnings aside. This book has footnotes! Lots and lots of them! AND the footnotes have endnotes! AND following all that are apendices! AND there is Ada Lovelace! AND it‘s just as nerdy as it gets!

So, if you do love notes AND are a sucker for all things 01, go enjoy this wonderful adventure.

exile's review

4.0

If Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage had been co-workers, this would be the world they inhabited. It also features my favourite character, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and his level-headed(1), steam-powered solutions to day-to-day activities.

As a fan of the web-version of the comic(2) I found this book to be everything I hoped it to be. I hope this sells well, so they get to produce a hardbound version of the rest of the illustrations, and of course, the well-researched footnotes.

--
1 - not at all poetical
2 - and of course the primary documents

tonyzale's review

5.0

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is a graphic novel romp, but it also has plenty of meat on its bones. Charles Babbage was a mathematician and inventor better at dreaming up projects like a steam powered calculator than completing them. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, pushed towards mathematics in the hopes disciplined study would save her from her father’s excesses. Together, they envisioned a world of computing that wouldn’t be fulfilled for more than a century. Author/illustrator Sydney Padua takes this theoretical reality and dresses it up in fiction; the dynamic duo actually build their computing machine and bring big data computing to the Victorian era. An ever-expanding computer made of gears and powered by boilers is a silly concept, but Padua skillfully incorporates passages from historic journals and correspondence into her dialog, bridging the gap back to the real Lovelace and Babbage. The book is heavily footnoted, providing additional context on the workings of Babbage’s machine, the duo’s connection with high society and figures like Karl Marx, Babbage’s pedantic criticism of poets and reviewers of his books, and oddities of the era’s mathematics like revolutionary France’s brief conversion to a 400 degree circle. These notes provide color and are a pleasure to read; they aren’t overly deep, but they display a level of research the reader won’t expect from a light graphic novel. This is an excellent package: a cast of eccentric, expressively illustrated characters and a fanciful look at Victorian engineering that doesn’t go too far off the steampunk deep end.

l1nds's review against another edition

5.0

This book is glorious and I want everyone to read it! It takes an important (and often overlooked) part of women's history and turns it into a fantastical and informative adventure. I'm dreadful at maths and science, and I still found something to love on every page! It's full of fascinating anecdotes and snippets of information, and quite honestly nothing I say can do it justice. Just please READ IT!