dyman associates publishing book
To begin with, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace are Victorian
London's most enthusiastic duo.
Charles Babbage was a 19th-century peculiar genius who designed
but never built two clearprecursors to the computer: the
"difference engine" and the "analytical engine."
Ada, Countess of Lovelace - often referred to as Ada Lovelace -
was the daughter of poet LordByron, and a mathematical prodigy. Two
decades younger, she collaborated with Babbage onwhat would become
an influential paper.
When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage's plans for a
huge mechanical calculatingmachine in 1842, she added annotations
three times longer than the original work. Her footnotesincluded
the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred
years before an actualcomputer was built. Unfortunately, Lovelace
died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper,and Babbage
never built Book any of his machines.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents an
energetic alternate reality inwhich Lovelace and Babbage do build
the Difference Engine and then use it to build runawayeconomic
models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder
realms of mathematics,and, of course, fight crime-for the sake of
both London and science.
Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those written by
Lovelace herself, historicalcuriosities, and never-before-seen
diagrams of Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered computer,The
Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully
whimsical, utterly unusual, and,above all, entirely
irresistible.
The novel is also made up of almost equal parts of dramatic,
slap-happy black-and-white comicpanels, in which Lovelace and
Babbage take on the powers of minor superheroes, and
footnotesreview and endnotes for historical background. Also, a
12-page appendix diagrams how theanalytical engine would have
looked.
The structure works better than one might think. The comics are
intellectually wild and emotionallyintense. The notes ground them
in reality.
This is an amusing, fanciful version of the true story, set in a
fantasy steampunk version of theworld.
