Tal MacNeil

Turing Tal MacNeil

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a gay mathematician whose cryptography efforts in the Second World War saved countless lives. His idea of a "universal machine" also became the first modern digital computer. In this surreal novella, Turing finds himself in a modern hospital, mysteriously revived, surrounded by unfamiliar technology. With a sceptical social worker and the friendship of a young trans woman and her brother, he struggles to make sense of an irrational universe. Other pieces in the collection include a mysterious proposal by the Archangel Uriel to a depressed mathematician, a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh from the perspective of the ark-builder Utnapishtim, and a remixed academic text becomes a meditation on the cosmos.