Ada Lovelace: The Byronic Woman. Now in paperback

[stubbleupdate]

Last year on FCBD I picked up a hefty hardcover based on buzz from I'm not even sure where.

First, the hard sell from Amazon
'So impossibly funny, clever, demented, charming and altogether wonderful that I was a convert within three pages. Buy it for everyone you know, regardless of what you think they like. Brilliant stuff' Lucy Mangan, Book of the Year, Stylist



*Nominated for the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album (new)*
*Nominated for the 2016 Eisner award for Best Writer/Artist*
*Winner of the British Book Design and Production Award for Graphic Novels*
*Winner of the Neumann Prize in the History of Mathematics*

In The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious set of adventures

Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses... Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron: mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have been the first computer, if he had ever finished it.

But what if things had been different? The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a delightful alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and use it to create runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wider realms of mathematics and, of course, fight crime - for the sake of both London and science. Extremely funny and utterly unusual, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage comes complete with historical curiosities, extensive footnotes and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered computer. And ray guns.



Top class punning, tbf

If you want a comic book that has more footnotes than panels, and even stretches the definition of what a comic book actually is, is charmingly illustrated and has jokes told in Boolean logic, I recommend that you buy this.
It's genuinely charming as long as you can deal with some groanworthy puns in the middle of the complicated mathematics and logic jokes.
It is absolutely clear that Sydney Padua absolutely loves her topic. Her research and engagement in the topic is almost unparalleled in anything else that I've read recently. Some of it is a bit exhausting, and I managed to read it only by breaking it up and doing no more than a chapter a sitting. Padua cites Will Eisner as an influence and there are some pages that look very little like a lot of other comics that you'll have read.

Comments

[ozaline]

Looks fun.

[q99]

Oh yes, I saw this in hard, I totally will pick up the soft!

[icon_uk]

Okay, I'm in for this! :)