Philip Glass tells all and Lovelace and Babbage get the comic novel treatment

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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Sydney Padua is a graphic artist and animator. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is comic novel, an amalgamation of history and fantasy in a steampunk style, featuring the fictionalised characters of nineteenth century digital pioneers Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

Anyone requiring an accurate historical account of their lives steer clear; this starts off like a Writers and Readers For Beginners edition but soon degenerates into comic book fairyland. Whether you find this entertaining and fun or a bit too contrived really depends on personal taste.

Charles Babbage is depicted like the most raving lunatic interpretations of Victor Frankenstein or a deranged Shakesphero gazing fixedly at the firmament: “Silence minion, who can comprehend my unavailing struggles?”

Ada Lovelace, meanwhile, is portrayed as a kind of Winona Ryder on ecstasy, eyes permanently bugged out on stalks.

At the beginning of the book we are introduced to our main characters and the plot sticks to historical fact – or thereabouts. Ada, as you may know, was the daughter of one of England’s most overrated poets: George Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, a keen mathematician who worried that her daughter might inherit her father’s poetical traits and so tortured her daughter to convince her otherwise.

“She was given lessons on a “reclining bed” to perfect her posture. If she fidgeted even with her fingers, her hands are tied in black bags and she was shut in a closet. She was five years old.”

The first apparent problem is that all the interesting information is contained in footnotes. After twenty pages of biography we learn that Ada died of cancer aged 36 and that Babbage died a bitter failure.

But reality is only a minor hiccough in Sydney Padua’s multiverse; in some other spacetime Charlie and Ada are heroic crimefighters. It is all a bit Doctor Who, the shitty Victorian episodes BBC scriptwriters seem so fond of. “To the Difference Engine!”

There are more copious footnotes which seem to refer to actual historical events, interspersed with music hall type bills advertising thrills which never materialise. Queen Victoria makes a walk on. The footnotes continue on nearly every page and tell a more coherent tale than the comic strip.

Getting technical – click for a larger image

There are a few facsimiles of pages from Punch, yet I can’t even detect what crime our heroes are supposed to be fighting – this is truly one unholy mess. My guess is it could be fathomed as edutainment – a fantasy comic on the one hand to make the footnotes of history more digestible. A pity, then, that the book has American spelling and uses ‘math’ instead of ‘maths’.

Even so, the ending of the story resembles Alice in Wonderland, before we are presented with some lengthy appendices which feature Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), and even they aren’t allowed to stand alone without more copious footnotes. Admittedly these are interspersed with references and diagrams regarding discoveries of historical significance which appears, again, to be a way of offering some reference material. Finally, there is a comic book epilogue which leaves me none the wiser.

Sydney Padua is a decent graphic artist, but as a writer she seems unable to contrive a storyline and stick with it. The book is crammed full of text but it is presented in a very random fashion and no amount of historical documentation can disguise the paucity of the storyline, which doesn’t do anything, go anywhere or mean anything.

No doubt the idea was to make these two historical figures appear engaging and to feature some kind of adventure to stimulate learning. It’s an approach that may well appeal to a younger audience, used to leaping from one topic to another with their online meanderings, but the logic behind The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage doesn’t compute for me. ®

Author Sydney Padua
Title The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer
Publisher Particular Books
Price £16.99 (Hardback), £9.99 (eBook) on sale 21st April, eBook 7th May
More info Publication web site