Extremely funny, engaging, unexpected and enjoyable semi biography of Ava Lovelace (programming) and Charles Babbage (hardware). Charles Babbage designed a Difference Engine and later the Analytical Engine, an enormous mechanical calculating machine Ava Lovelace proposed a method for automating instructions for the machine via punch cards.
Sydney Padua has taken the established facts about both extraordinary people and proposed an alternative universe where they completed their work and furthered their collaboration in all manner directions. She balances the work with the characters by deploying a wonderfully absurd sense of humour and creating thrilling adventures in very unexpected ways.
It is extremely unlikely that anyone has managed to subject economic models to such effective review or could have George Elliot wandering inside the labyrinth of the Difference Engine as it mercilessly edit her first book.
Sydney Padua’s abundant sympathy for Lovelace and Babbage is backed up by enormous research. The abundance of footnotes is never a drag on the reader, they are sources of joy and surprise that add hugely to the deep pleasure of reading this book. The book is a very dense read, never a tough or hard one. I particularly like her pleasure in finding an fantastically obscure article that clearly showed the affection and very high regards Babbage had for Ada Lovelace. This is important in the light of assertions that she was a marginal figure in the work done on the mechanical calculating machines.
It is the joyously friendly art that lifts the book into the hugely engaging read that it is. Sydney Padua has astonishingly expressive art, a cartoony style that is just exaggerated enough to express the energy and wonder of the work and to create the most absurd situations that make their point with deft wit.
The cast are energetic and expressive, it is the art of the mechanical machines that shines so brightly. She can create detailed and specific drawings of the engines, more importantly she can create mad science versions of them that are marvels in themselves.
Ava Lovelace and Charles Babbage lead extraordinary lives and imagined something that was utterly new, they failed, for a wide set of reasons, to complete these ideas. Sydney Padua has allowed them to succeed brilliantly and that is a wonderful achievement and a pleasure for the reader.
