A review by tonyzale
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

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.