Now Available: the Free Soundtrack for the Novel! Click the Banner to Stream or Download.

Days since the Centenary: 326
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,198

I’m not sure that Jack Copeland actually manages to sum up Alan Turing in three words.

Nonetheless, this brief video provides a nice portrait that helps rescue the real Alan Turing, the man you would meet face to face, from the that other Turing:
Turing the Icon
Turing the Guy on the Postage Stamp
Turing the Entry in Wikipedia.

It’s easily worth two minutes and forty-seven seconds of your time.

Copeland’s first three words: Humour, courage, isolation.
Copeland’s second three words: Patriotic, unconventional, genius.

It’s a compact Turing poem:

Humour, courage, isolation.
Patriotic, unconventional, genius.

Now Available: the Free Soundtrack for the Novel! Click the Banner to Stream or Download.

Days since the Centenary: 313
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,211

Holy cats! The melodic interpretations of the Turing legacy just keep on coming.

(To catch up on previous installments, see: Hum Along to Turing and Hum Along to Turing, Part Deux)

I’ve actually got another music-related post backlogged at the moment, but since this one is time-sensitive I thought I’d better post it now. (Plus, this is a good time to mention a relevant musical freebie, which I’ll get to in a moment.)

1. Album for Bletchley Park

First, we have a brand new album of electronic music called Music by Programmers, released to raise funds for the Bletchley Park Trust and the National Museum of Computing.

Bletchley Park, of course, was where Turing and his fellow codebreakers worked during World War II (see the About Alan Turing tab if you’re new to the subject).

Bletchley Park

According to TechWeek Europe:

The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park Trust have announced a novel fund-raising effort to attract young people to begin studying computer programming… The aim is to raise £5,000 to be spent on parent-child maths workshops at Bletchley Park and to allow [the museum] to start a regular computer club for young people. The download will be available from 29 April from CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon MP3 And Google Play with all of the profits going towards the projects.

The album was curated by Jason Gorman, who created Apes With Hobbies, Love Songs from a Gilded Age.  If you want to get an idea of Gorman’s musical sensibilities, you can download Apes for free here.

Gorman is clearly  predisposed to making music that honours great minds, given that Apes open with a track called Feynman Dreams of California Nights.

Music by Programmers and Jason Gorman

The eight tracks on the album are all original, and pay tribute to an earlier generation of electronic musicians, like Kraftwerk (still going strong), Jean-Michel Jarre (who recently released a new album), and Tangerine Dream (who have a new album out this month with awesome Queen-guitarist-cum-astrophysicst Brian May).  Gorman also recorded two of the eight tracks on the album himself.

I think this is an awesome way to raise money for a great cause. You can hear samples on the iTunes web page for the album. Buy it, rate it, and pass the word.

2. The Free Bonus Album

At the outset I mentioned a free bonus album related to Turing, so here’s the scoop.

Regular readers of this page will know that, while I post here for the love of it, professionally I’m a writer and editor.  I’m the non-fiction editor at International Speculative Fiction, which has published numerous award-winning authors, and I have several published works of my own.

My novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Kobo) features a sentient artificial intelligence instantiated in a synthetic human body. By its own choice it is called Alan and the body it uses is the image of Alan Turing. At the outset these choices seem trivial, but they turn out to go deeper than it first appears.

Luck + Death

As with all my books, I try to give readers of Luck + Death a lot of free stuff to go along with the story. There are bonus sections right inside the book that provide background material (including a section on Turing), and the home page (www.LuckAndDeath.com) has more bonus material and a library of free PDFs.

Well, now the novel also has a free soundtrack that you can stream or download, Luck + Death: the Soundtrack for the Movie in Your Head.

Here’s the official announcement for anyone who wants to try it out:

After much work and planning, the free soundtrack album for Luck + Death is now available. Fourteen tracks by artists in eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Hungary, Sweden, Turkey, and the U.S.A.).

This is a varied array of musicians and composers, from independent musicians like guitarist Jason Brock and saxophonist Stefan Thaens, to film composer Nathan Fleet, to veteran performer John Pazdan, to classical composer (and music professor) Russell Wilson.

Styles range from dreamy electronic to jumped up funk to electronic classical, all of it spiced up with spoken word performance and bookended by field recordings from the streets of Shanghai.

Here’s a sample, track number eight:

____________________
08 Distrito Federal (Stefan Thaens, Belgium) 4:18

____________________

All tracks are available for streaming or for download as MP3s and the album comes with the choice of two different versions of the cover art, This Version (above) and That Version (below).

And this is a project that appreciates music as more than just a spectator sport. One track is a mix by the author called El Paraíso Perdido (Paradise Lost), which has been posted on ccMixter.org with an invitation to anyone and everyone to remix it, deconstruct it, or reinvent it.

I’ve already received one version from a ccMixter member and I know another is on the way. All mixes are posted on the soundtrack home page.

Here’s one more track to whet your appetite:

____________________

12 Dogware (Zapac, Hungary) 3:40

____________________

Curiosity piqued?

Get it here: Luck + Death: the Soundtrack for the Movie in Your Head.

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Days since the Centenary: 255

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,269

In a recent post entitled Hum Along to Turing I reported that London-based band Fiction was releasing their debut album The Big Other, including a song called The Apple that was about, and dedicated to, our boy Alan Turing.

Somehow my search for a video at the time of that post failed to come up with one that was posted on YouTube waaaaay back in 2010, possibly because it’s not an official video but a live version of the song captured at the Offset Festival in 2010.

(Although, honestly, if you type in search terms like “Fiction” and “Apple” you’d think that a song by Fiction called Apple would come up, irrespective of whether it was a fan video or an official release.)

So, until an official version comes out, enjoy the performance below.

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Days since the Centenary: 246

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,278

Out magazine reports that London-based band Fiction has a single called The Apple on their debut CD The Big Other that is about–and dedicated to–Alan Turing.

Band member Mike Barrett wrote the song and shared its genesis with Out:

Barrett shared that he first learned about Turing from reading his work on algorithms and his contribution at Bletchley Park—which during the WWII was the site of the UK’s main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School. ”[I] subsequently read about his trial, and the circumstances of his death came as a bit of a surprise… Here’s a genius—a man that arguably invented the computer, who made a priceless contribution to defeating the Nazis—put on trial for his sexuality. Of course, countless others were tried in the UK, and continue to be around the world, but Turing’s story illustrated to me so graphically the sheer absurdity of prejudice, and ‘The Apple’ is a small attempt at understanding his personal torment at that time.”

The Out article seems to be set up to stream the song through Soundcloud, but the streaming isn’t fuctional as of this writing and I can’t find the song through a search of Soundcloud or on Fiction’s YouTube page. So while I look forward to hearing it, I can’t say anything about the sound of the song just yet.

Fiction

The band sounds good overall, though, with a retro-futurismo vibe that calls to mind Roxy Music and certain strains of 1980s new wave, so I’m hopeful. And the Out article does provide the lyrics, reproduced below.

The Apple - For Alan Turing

They said Alan
they said listen, Alan
they said listen, Alan
you’ve got a simple decision
a simple choice
but it’s one or the other

so I had a choice
I had a choice
I had a choice

but they’ve been making my mind up
they’ve been making my body
into something it’s not

the algorithm was nothing special
I just took a bite
the code was really nothing much
and I just took a bite

they said it’s not right
they said it’s not right
they said it’s not right
and we can’t let you do that
we can’t let you get away with that

so I took a bite
I took a bite
I took a bite

because they’ve been making my mind up
they’ve been making my body
into something it’s not

the algorithm was nothing special
I just took a bite

You can find Fiction’s YouTube channel here.

The Big Other will be released on March 4, and Fiction will be on tour in the UK throughout March.

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Days since the Centenary: 224

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,300

I was talking with my business partner Saul–who is the other half of IndieBookLauncher.com–the other day and we were speculating about which existing Star Trek villain might get reprised in the new movie, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Saul ventured that it was probably the great Khan Noonien Singh, played with awesome dignity and dangerousness by Ricardo Montalbán in the original series episode “Space Seed” and in the second ST movie (he is also a character in several ST novels and doubtless in some of the famous slash fiction that notoriously emerged from the series).

Benedict Cumberbatch: Khan or Khan’t?

I said I hoped he was right, because they’re almost certain to bring back Khan at some point, and if anyone can do the character justice it will be Benedict Cumberbatch, who is known to play the villain in the next movie (though the identity of the villain is, as I write this, still under wraps).

Then, yesterday, came the news that Cumberbatch appears poised to play Turing in the biopic that caused such a fuss last year when the screenplay sold for a large (though undisclosed) sum on the strength of Leonardo DiCaprio wanting to star. Some time ago DiCaprio dropped out, now it seems Cumberbatch is likely to take over.

Which is good news for Turing fans, because Cumberbatch is an awesome actor (although the A.V. Club alleges that he’s not an actor, in fact not even a human being, but rather a “complex script file that allows users to produce the most British person possible”). And Cumberbatch’s star power can only help in terms of actually getting the film made.

I want to pause, though, to consider just what a geeky conquest this is for the actor. In the headline I referred to this as a hat trick, because:

• Cumberbatch already plays Julian Assange in an upcoming biopic (see image below),
• he’s in the Hobbit trilogy (he plays a role and also voices Smaug the dragon), and
• he’s in the aforementioned Star Trek movie.

Now it appears he’ll play Turing, too. Maybe I should have said he’s scored a–well, whatever the hell the word is that’s like hat trick but means scoring four goals in one game instead of three (I am nerding out at the moment, so don’t ask me to recall sports things).

Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange in a still from The Fifth Estate

And, lest we forget, Cumberbatch already plays Sherlock Holmes, who is nothing if not the uber-nerd (though a coke-snorting nerd who’s good with his fists).

All of which is not even to mention that he’s signed on to star in the upcoming sort-of-Monty-Python movie, which involves four surviving Pythons. Nerd-gasm anyone?

This can only mean one thing: I look forward to his inevitable role as the newest character on The Big Bang Theory.

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Days since the Centenary: 191

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,333

What an awesome year for Turing fans–which in the computer age is pretty much everyone, whether they know it or not.

Still, at long last the Alan Turing Year is drawing to a close. As of midnight tonight, it will officially all be over. But the Turing-verse has never been constrained by official notions.

I’ve written a number of times about the people I call Turing Elves–people who create works or undertake endeavors that honour, explore, memorialize, or otherwise focus upon Alan Turing and his work without any official sanction, without asking anyone’s permission.

I think Turing Elvery is an especially appropriate way to recall Turing. After all, this was a scientist who–despite having worked at the highest levels of officialdom during the war–began his enquiries on his own, and continued them after the world of officials had condemned and rejected him. And quite apart from his work as a scientist, this was a man who ignored social disapproval with regard to sexual preference, persisting in doing so even after he was convicted criminally for having had gay sex. Doing things for their own sake, and doing them whether or not others approved, was a key theme in his life. It might be too  recursive to call Turing the first Turing Elf, but he certainly set the ball rolling.

And long before the Alan Turing Year was a sparkle in anyone’s eye, Andrew Hodges  began work on his biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma. It has recently been issued in an excellent new centennial edition and is now not only a  classic work within the Turing-verse but also in the world of scientific biography generally. Throughout the Alan Turing Year, Hodges has been a key member of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee–in other words, an official of sorts–but back then he was a Turing Elf. Maybe he was the first.

Not long after Hodges finished his biography, science fiction author Greg Bear wrote “Tangents,” a short story featuring a protagonist clearly based on Turing that was  first published in Omni magazine in January 1986. It went on to win the Hugo and Nebula awards and to be anthologized several times and it set the precedent for a whole lineage of fictional incarnations of Alan Turing. Bear, too, was a Turing Elf and remains enthusiastic about Turing Elvery in general.

The trend has continued, not only in written works, but in sculpture, street art and graffiti, painting, music, drama (on stage, film, and television), and in many other forms. (I’m still waiting for the Turing opera–apparently there’s one on the way.)

And the Turing Elvery will continue, I suspect even more energetically than before the centenary took place.

As part of it, this page will continue. In theory it’s now counting down the days to the bicentennial–just as it counted down the days until the centenary began. Who knows if web pages, as such, will even exist in 2112, but the countdown signals the intention to keep this page going and the spirit of the Turing celebrations alive even after 2012 has ended.

And I will be continuing with other forms of Elvery. I am at work on Conjuring Turing: The Fictional Afterlife of Alan Turing, a book for the general reader about the sub-genre of fiction that started with Greg Bear’s story “Tangents” and now includes a wide variety of authors working in several different literary traditions.

The book will include, where possible, interviews with the authors of the works under discussion. So far I’ve found the authors I’ve contacted to be very enthusiastic, even Greg Bear, whose story first appeared almost 30 years ago.

Here’s an update:

• I’ve already interviewed Rudy Rucker about his novel, published earlier this year, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel. Turing & Burroughs is a potent surrealistic roller coaster ride that not only celebrates Turing, but also features Rucker’s note-perfect literary impersonation of Beat author William Burroughs. You can read the interview here.
• I’m in the process of interviewing Christos Papadimitriou, the author of Turing (A Novel About Computation).
• Recently Greg Bear himself has agreed to be part of the project, and that interview is underway. You can find the story “Tangents” in his short story collection of the same name.
• Paul Morris, the author of the children’s book Time Traveller Danny and the Codebreaker (part of the Time Traveller Kids series) has also signed on. He very kindly sent me a copy of his book, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which I recommend for any kid who enjoys a great time travel yarn (as well as for any adult who likes a good story, especially anyone with a passing interest in our boy Alan).

So, for anyone who’s sad to see the Alan Turing Year go, take heart! The official year was great, but it was the icing on the cake–the official expression of an enterprise that started a long time ago and won’t be stopping any time soon.

And stay tuned to this page–it’s not going anywhere.

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Days since the Centenary: 144

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,380

The Turing Elves are at it again.

(Really? It’s almost the end of the Alan Turing Year and you haven’t encountered the term “Turing Elf” before? See the tab at the top or just click here.)

What have this band of Merry Mathematiphile Pranksters done today? Well, some folks over at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have been experimenting with the caustic effect, which Science Codex explains thusly:

This “caustic” effect is well known and easy to observe; a bit of sunlight shining on a pool of water produces patterns that dance on the surrounding tiles or walls. These undulating lines, apparently random, are generated by light that hits the moving surface of a pool or puddle. This effect, which is very mobile and dynamic in liquid, produces static patterns with solid transparent materials such as glass or transparent acrylic (better known as Plexiglass).

Their idea was to create a program that would allow them to shape a piece of glass or plexiglass or other material into a structure that would bend and focus light so that it would produce an image.

There’s nothing embedded in the material, and no image is imprinted upon it. Instead it is molded into a shape that will produce the desired effect when held in the correct relation to a light source and a target surface. That sounds all complex, and in fact it’s difficult to do, but once you see it, it’s easy to understand the theory.

Here’s an image of the caustic effect at work–and this is where the Elves make their appearance. Note whose portrait the folks at the Ecole chose to create.

The caustic effect, put to Turing Elf use.

If you want a more lucid explanation than I’ve given (and in a cool accent to boot), check out the video below.

I told you. Those fricken’ elves just never sleep.

[To find out more, see report from the Ecole here.]

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Days since the Centenary: 136

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,388

In theory the Alan Turing Year is winding down–it has less than two months to go–but in fact it doesn’t seem to be slowing much.

Here’s one of the latest testaments to Turing’s place in history: a detailed speculation on whether the Second World War might have turned out very differently if he hadn’t existed.

Now, counterfactual speculation is always tricky, so whatever conclusion one reaches in an exercise like this will always be open to attack. Whatever your conclusion, someone can find traction to make an argument against it. There are simply too many variables.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about going through this exercise with Turing, then, is simply that you have to ask the question very seriously. Because it’s entirely realistic to say that without him the war might have ended very differently indeed, and there are not many people about whom you can say that.

In this case the person doing the speculating is Jack Copeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

Professor Jack Copeland

We’ve seen Professor Copeland on this page before, most notably in Alan Turing & The Suicide Question. Copeland is conducting this historical exercise on the web page Big Questions Online.

Big Questions Online interrogates the possibility of history without Alan Turing.

For a Turing scholar, Copeland is admirably restrained in his assessment of the possible effect of not having had Turing’s contribution to the Allied war effort.

That restraint on Copeland’s part, that conservatism, gives his estimate of the difference between the world with Turing and the world without him even greater impact than a more free-wheeling scenario might have had.

History records that the allied armies took roughly a year to fight their way from the beaches to Berlin. In a counterfactual scenario, in which Hitler had had more time to consolidate his preparations, this struggle might have taken much longer—twice as long maybe. That translates into a very large number of lives. At a conservative estimate, each year of fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths… these colossal numbers of lives—7 million had the war continued for another year, 21 million if, owing to the Atlantic U-boats and a strengthened Fortress Europe, the war had toiled on for as long as another three years—do most certainly convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing’s contribution.

The number of lives at stake is so large that even if you cut them arbitrarily in half, or quarter them, they’re still vast.

The number of people who would have suffered and died rather than having lived out their lives is immense. The number of their descendents who would not have been born, millions of them alive today, is even greater. Maybe it even includes you.

Even putting aside Turing’s other achievements–his continuing legacy in computer science and artificial intelligence, not to mention his later work in biology–that’s one hell of a legacy.

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Days since the Centenary: 130

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,394

So I’ve been busy lately, as any regular visitors to this site can probably tell, in part with my new Turing book project (if you missed that announcement, see the post Interview: Rudy Rucker Brings Alan Turing Back From The Dead + A Surprise Announcement).

My schedule having been what it is, I didn’t prepare a Halloween post in advance this year. Last year I posted On Hallowe’en I Wore My Homo Sapiens Costume, which included photos of an Alan Turing jack-o-lantern. But this year I was busy and, as much as I love Halloween, it has no particular tie to Turing.

Or maybe it does — some deep, supernatural connection I’m not aware of — because the Turing-Elves weren’t content to let the day go by without connecting the day to the man.

Enter Oscar, a software engineer in San Mateo, California (home to actor Barry Bostwick who, on a Halloween note, so adeptly played the character of Brad in the movie version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

Oscar was participating in an office pumpkin-carving event and settled on the idea of creating a jack-o-lantern honoring a luminary from computer history.

Clearly Oscar is a man of discerning taste (not to mention a fan of the classics and a celebrant of the Alan Turing Year), because rather than creating a portrait of another worthy contender (maybe Ada Lovelace or Steve Jobs) he decided to create his own version of a Turing pumpkin.

He was also good enough to send me a few photos, so here I am, creating another Turing/Halloween post. Looks like it’s turning into a tradition.

Here are Oscar’s pics. Happy Halloween everyone and I look forward to seeing you all again next year!

Transferring Turing”s likeness to the pumpkin.

Turing takes shape.

Voila! Finis!

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Days since the Centenary: 87
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,437

It’s our birthday! Well, sort of.

This site will be one year old on October 3, but we’re celebrating early with two seriously cool announcements.

Announcement Number One

First, I’ve just conducted an interview with Rudy Rucker, computer scientist, science fiction writer, and two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award (for his books Software and Wetware, both part of the Ware Tetralogy).

Rucker is generally considered — along with  William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others — to be one of the pioneers of the science fiction sub-genre that became known as cyberpunk.

The subject of the interview? Rucker’s new book, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel, which has just gone on sale today.

Rudy Rucker

This novel is a surreal romp through postwar England, Tangier, and America that combines the eerie black humor of William Burroughs, the garish carnival colors of a 1950s science fiction movie, and Rucker’s unique voice.

The Ware Tetralogy, flanked by Software and Wetware

Here’s the jacket copy for Turing & Burroughs:

What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.

And that ain’t the half of it. This book has more inventive ideas per page (among other redeeming qualities) than you can shake a fricken’ stick at.

It digs deep and yet moves quickly, with a bouncy energy. It portrays real historical figures in note-perfect performances. And it just may contain a mild hallucinogen that’s absorbed through the fingertips as you flip the pages.

Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

So, we’ll get to the interview itself in a moment, but first: the second announcement.

Announcement Number Two

Why was I interviewing Rudy Rucker?

Not just because he was about to publish a novel that featured Alan Turing, although that would have been reason enough.

Repeat readers of this page will know that I’m the author of a science fiction novel, Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, that also features Alan Turing, although in my case he doesn’t appear in person.

The Fallen World Books so far: Luck & Death and Felon and the Judas Kiss (both available now) and Los Angeles Honey (coming this year).

When I was researching and writing Luck & Death, I discovered that there were far more short stories and novels featuring Alan Turing as a character (or as a significant off-stage presence, as in Luck & Death) than I had ever imagined.

The flesh and blood Turing died decades ago, but he has recently acquired an impressive roster of fictional incarnations, from his star turn in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, to his less well-known performance in John L. Casti’s The Cambridge Quintet, to his role as a lurking off-screen influence in Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives. 

Some of the other Turing fiction available.

So several months ago I began work on a new book — unannounced until now — called Conjuring Turing, The Fictional Afterlife of Alan Turing, which will take stock of this sub-genre in a way that I hope will be interesting for Turing geeks and Turing noobs alike.

Wherever possible, I will not just discuss a story or book, I’ll also interview the author, and the first of those interviews is the one with Rudy Rucker, which you’re about to read.

The next interview will be with Christos Papadimitriou, another computer scientist turned novelist, who is the author of Turing (A Novel About Computation).

Christos Papadimitriou, with the textbook he co-authored (showing Turing on the cover) and his Turing novel.

The Rucker Interview

So there you have it, two books to enjoy.

Turing & Burroughs you can dig into immediately by way of instant download — details are available on Rucker’s page.

Conjuring Turing will give you something to look forward to.

And now, on to the interview. The unusual numbering of the questions and answers is to allow this interview to be added to Rucker’s ever-growing collection entitled All The Interviews.

____________________

Long May He Wave: Nas Hedron interviews Rudy Rucker about his book, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (September 13, 2012)

Appearing from Transreal Books, September 22, 2012

Q 363. I wonder if you can set the stage for us with reference to Alan Turing, you, and writing. Who was Alan Turing to you before you wrote Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel? And what gave you the impulse to write your novel about him?

A 363. In the course of getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic, I learned the technical details of Turing’s theorems about the idealized computers that came to be called Turing machines. I read his epochal 1937 paper “On Computable Numbers” numerous times, and I was struck by the clarity and the depth of his thought.

Being interested in the possibilities of intelligent machines, I also studied Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a non-technical paper in which he proposes the so-called Turing imitation game as a test for true AI: you might say that a program is intelligent if you can’t tell it from a human when you’re exchanging emails with it. It’s worth noting that Turing initially framed his “imitation game” in terms of someone trying to distinguish between a woman and a man.

Later I became interested in using so-called cellular automata programs to simulate the patterns that emerge in the tissues of plants and animals—patterns like the the spots on leopards, the markings­ on butterfly wings, the zigzags on South Pacific cone shells. This is what Turing was working on near the end of his life. In 1952 he published an amazing paper, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” In the morphogenesis paper he explains how, by dint of days of hand computation, he emulated a biological cellular automaton process to produce irregular black spots like you might see on the side of a brindle cow.

To me Turing is a heroic and inspiring figure. He worked on deeply fascinating things without getting lost in merely technical mathematics.

The other compelling aspect of the Turing story is that he was openly gay, he was persecuted for it, and that he had a strange and tragic death—which is usually described as a suicide.

Regarding Turing’s death by cyanide poisoning, I’ve always felt there’s a real possibility that he was in fact assassinated by agents of the British government. This seems even likelier now that we know Turing was involved in a top-secret code-breaking effort during World War II. In the 1950s, there was a collective hysteria over the possibility of homosexuals being a security risk.

Before I began contemplating my own novel, I’d read some stories and plays about Turing. But I didn’t feel that any of these works captured the vibrant image of Turing that I wanted to project. There can be a tendency to write about homosexuality in a lugubrious tone—as if a homosexual is a pathetic person who’s afflicted with a lethal disease. But Turing was anything but downcast about his predilections.

In the spring of 2007, I wrote a short story about Turing, “The Imitation Game.” And this story later came to be the first chapter of my novel. In the short story, Turing escapes being poisoned by British government agents. And to escape, he swaps appearances with his dead male lover. And here comes the science fiction: Turing grows two new faces by using principles that he described in that paper where he generates the shape of a spot on a black-and-white cow.

As sometimes happens to me, I had difficulty in selling my story. Maybe it wasn’t sufficiently solemn and lugubrious—and I was presenting Turing was a gay outsider, heedless of proprieties, and by no means a victim. In any case, in 2008 my story appeared in the British magazine Interzone and in 2010 in The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates.

Early on, I began wondering if there might be some way to expand my Turing story into a novel. At the end of my story, Turing escapes to Tangier, and I formed the notion that he ought to connect with the Beat writer William Burroughs, who was living there at that time. Two brilliant men, gay, outcast—perhaps they’d hit it off.

I’ve been a huge Burroughs fan ever since I first came across an excerpt of Naked Lunch in the beatnik magazine, The Evergreen Review—this would have been back in 1960, when I was fourteen. My big brother had a subscription to the magazine, and I’d leaf through it, looking for smut. Instead I found a literary career.

I particularly admire the irresponsible and laceratingly funny style of the letters Burroughs wrote to his friends from Tangier. And so I decided to write my second Turing story in the form of letters from Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg.

This second story, “Tangier Routines,” was so gleefully scabrous that I didn’t bother sending it to any magazines, science-fictional or otherwise. Instead, in the fall of 2008, I printed it in a webzine Flurb that I’d managed to start. And then in 2010 and 2011, I ran two further Turing & Burroughs stories in Flurb.

I was still unsure about how to build my tales into a full novel, but in 2010 I finally read Alan Turing: The Enigma, the wonderful biography by Andrew Hodges, And here I learned that Turing was everything I could have hoped. Stubborn, unrepentant, impulsive, and with a very warm and human personality.

I discovered that, as part of some psychological therapy he was undergoing, Turing himself made a start at writing a transreal speculative novel late in his life—and this allayed any uneasiness I’d felt about dragging his name into the gutter of science-fiction.

So why did I write a beatnik SF novel about Alan Turing? In short, I’d come to think of him as my friend, and I wanted to give his character a cool place to live.

Q 364. What interested you about bringing the mathematician Alan Turing together with the Beat writer William Burroughs?

A 364. To some extent this was a matter of convenience. I needed Turing to flee England in 1954 to escape assassination by the secret service. Even though Turing has changed his face in my novel, it seemed like he’d feel safer taking trains and ferries than in trying to get on a plane.

From my familiarity with Burroughs, I knew that Tangier was an open city at this time, a good place to take refuge—Burroughs often referred to it as Interzone. And, checking my references, I realized that he was indeed living in Tangier at this time.

Having my two heroes meet seemed perfect. Having them connect also solved a problem I was having in figuring out how to write a gay male character in an effective way.

William Burroughs is a queer writer whom I’ve always found easy to identify with. He has an outspoken zest and a defiant rudeness that make it seem cool and reasonable and entirely desirable to be a homosexual heroin addict.

Even though I myself am merely a punk SF writer, I sometimes feel a certain social opprobrium regarding my esoteric interests, and, over the years, I’ve occasionally girded myself by adopting Burroughsian attitudes and mannerisms. Wearing the old master’s character armor.

One of the challenges in writing a William Burroughs character was that I had to deal with the fact that, a couple of years before the start of my novel, Burroughs had shot and killed his wife Joan in Mexico City. At first I felt like this was too explosive and difficult to write about directly. But then I realized that I had to face the killing.

So my Turing and Burroughs end up going to to Mexico City, resurrecting Joan, and letting her run a number on Burroughs. I wanted to give Joan a voice, and to give her a chance to get even.

I wrote the Mexico City chapter from the Burroughs point of view, writing very fast. It was like I was possessed—but in a good way. The experience was heavy and ecstatic. For months I’d been anxious about writing the chapter, and all at once it was done

I’m always happy when I’m being Bill Burroughs. He didn’t give a f*ck what people think. And neither did Alan Turing.

Q 365. Its impossible to read Turing & Burroughs without comparing and contrasting Turing’s real life with his life in your novel. Two of the simplest ways in which one might develop a story about an outsider’s relationship with the world are victory and defeat. In a victory story, the outsider transforms the world into something more congenial; in a defeat story, the world crushes the outsider.

In Turing’s real life, defeat was the way things played out. But throughout much of The Turing Chronicles, it looks as though Turing is headed for victory or at least for a rapprochement. He and his allies are turning everyone into shapeshifting mutants like themselves—what you call “skuggers.” But then, at the end of your novel, you return to something closer to Turing’s real life, something like defeat. Your Turing character saves the world, and he dies. Did you plan this in advance?

A 365. That’s a very interesting question, and I hadn’t thought about this so clearly before.

I’ve always been piqued and annoyed by the defeat aspect of Turing’s actual life. Either he was goaded into suicide or he was murdered outright. So, as I mentioned before, In writing Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel, I wanted to create a world in which Turing escapes his tragic fate and lives on to have wonderful adventures.

But I knew from the start of my novel that, even though my Turing character has escaped England, he’s a marked man. The pigs, the bullies, the scumbag straight-arrows—they’re unrelenting in their efforts to bring down our Alan. So my novel takes on the quality of a long chase.

It would have been possible, at least in principle, to write a novel in which Turing manages to convert everyone in the world into a shapeshifting skugger like himself. But fairly early on, we begin to understand that this wouldn’t be a pleasant endpoint to reach. We want to be ordinary humans, not skuggers.

So I needed for Turing to somehow undo the mutations—but without killing off all the people who’d become skuggers. And this wasn’t going to be easy, with the cops and feds breathing down his neck. So before long, Turing was heading towards a world-redeeming self-sacrifice. But this felt like the most dramatic way to go. Turing as Savior. It’s a big, strong ending.

I think one can argue that Turing doesn’t truly suffer defeat here. He transcends. As the Beat writer Jack Kerouac would put it, Alan ends up safe in heaven dead. And in the context of my novel’s world, heaven is a real place.

Q 366. In Turing & Burroughs, Turing experiments with what one might call computational human flesh. This bears a certain family resemblance to “flickercladding,” the soft robot flesh you imagined in the Ware Tetralogy, in which each grain of the cladding acts as a processing unit. This particular feature of your work puts me in mind of the effects that director David Cronenberg uses in his movie version of Naked Lunch—I’m thinking of his Burroughs character’s soft, genitalia-like typewriters. Are you conscious of a reason why you like conflating computation and flesh?

A 366. I’ve always been bored by the idea of rigid, clunky, machine-like robots. I wanted robots to be funky and wiggly and sexy. I think it’s likely that if we ever have really useful and intelligent robots, they’re going to be more like tentacled octopi than like brittle ants. Of course thirty years ago, when I started writing about flickercladding and piezoplastic “moldie” robots in my Ware novels, this wasn’t at all a familiar idea.

Having gotten used to the idea of soft machines, it became natural for me to turn things around—and to have the cellular structure of human flesh become as malleable as the material of a computer display.

In my Ware novels there’s a drug called “merge” that lets people melt together inside a tub called a love puddle. And in Turing & Burroughs, a person who’s a skugger can turn into something like giant slug. There’s a scene where Turing and another skugger have sex by twisting themselves around each other while hanging from a rafter at Burroughs’s parents’ house. Mrs. Burroughs throws them out.

Reading a draft of Turing & Burroughs, my wife said, “Oh, you’re always doing this, having people merge together, it’s so icky.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s sex, isn’t it? That’s how it is.”

We’re biological organisms—we’re not computers, and we’re not machines.

Q 367. In your free downloadable book-length Notes forthe Turing & Burroughs novel, you mentioned the possibility of having J. Edgar Hoover be a character. I’m a little disappointed that he didn’t make it into the book. I had a hankering to see Turing and Hoover go head to head. What kinds of considerations are important in making decisions about what to leave out and what to put in?

A 367. My sense was that I didn’t want to put too many famous people into my book. If you overdo that, then you’re name-checking, and it gets to be like a bus tour of the homes of the stars. And the stars dazzle away the reality of the characters whose lives you want to delve into.

If I am going to recreate a historical character, I want it to be an interesting person whom I like. And for sure that’s not J. Edgar Hoover! He’s a dead horse. Just because I write something in my notes for my novels, doesn’t mean I’m really serious about using it. Often in my notes I’m just killing time and goofing around. Waiting for the Muse.

Given that I had Burroughs and Turing in my novel, I did feel that I ought to bring in some other Beats and at least one other scientist. I went for Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.

Ulam isn’t too well known, but he did a lot of fascinating things. He helped invent the hydrogen bomb, he wrote some of the first interesting computer programs, and he worked with lava-lamp-like continuous cellular automata. His friends thought he was too scattered, too much of a playboy. My kind of guy.

I was happy to have Ginsberg and Cassady show up in a Cadillac. My friend Gregory Gibson read a draft of the novel and he said that scene was like in a circus when you see the wild clowns getting out of a car.

I held back from putting Kerouac into Turing & Burroughs, as Jack would have been too much. He would have taken over. Remember that the main Beat I wanted to write about was William Burroughs.

When I was in the middle of writing the novel, I happened to see some video footage of Burroughs at his house in Lawrence, Kansas, taken a year or two before he died. And I knew right away I could use this scenario for the last chapter of my book. So the last chapter is set as a transcript of Burroughs talking to a video camera.

“And now I’m turning off the machine.”

That’s the book’s last sentence, with Burroughs talking. I like that ending. You might say that it captures the theme of the book.

You can turn off the machines and get wiggly. Even if you’re Alan Turing. Long may he wave.