History remembers British mathematician Alan Turing as the father of modern computing with an ultimately tragic life, but it’s impossible to distill any one person down to a handful of details. Over 70 years since his death by suicide, the Turing is often recalled as a introverted, dispassionate l oner—but his own words present a starkly different person. “We’ve distilled a version of Turing that is a two-dimensional stereotype. He’s come to be seen as socially unaware, entirely concerned with logic and numbers, and pretty isolated,” Sarah Dillon, a literature professor at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. Dillon recently took the time to examine a very unique, often overlooked archival item from Turing’s life: a six-page, handwritten and incomplete short story known as Pryce’s Buoy written by the man himself. After transcribing the draft and publishing her analysis in The Review of English Studies, Dillon is certain the mathematician was a much different man than the one described today. “His short story reveals a very different man: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex,” she said. The 5th and 6th pages of Alan Turing’s unfinished and unpublished short story known as ‘Pryce’s Buoy.’ Credit: King’s College, Cambridge Turing likely wrote the untitled story in late 1952 or early 1953. The narrative centers on a potential sexual encounter between a working-class man named Ron Miller and Alec Pryce, a scientist famous for inventing the ascribed title device. Dillon said it’s obvious that Pryce is a stand-in for Turing, and she is confident that the author intended the tale as a fictionalization of the real event that led to his arrest for “gross indecency” in 1951. “Pryce’s Buoy opens with the two characters’ assessing one another’s intentions from afar in a park shortly before Christmas,” she said. “They then sit next to one other on a bench and continue their silent evaluations. In the text, Miller wonders about Pryce’s glances: “Could he be mistaken? No, he was having a furtive look. Just a bit shy.” Meanwhile, Pryce has his own opinion: “Not a real beauty, but [he] had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.” “I love the hesitancy, the way it evokes the uncertainty of potential sexual encounter, the ‘am I reading this situation wrong?’ worry,” explained Dillon. “Turing gets those tensions, the leaning in and backing out. He does it really well.” Unfortunately, the draft ends mid-sentence on the sixth page with the words, “Ron wouldn’t.” With no other drafts likely to exist, no one will know how the two men fared in Turing’s story, if the plot turned more sexually explicit, or how it concluded. Scholars even wonder if Turing’s mother later censored the story to protect her son. “There was clearly more and that’s so frustrating. We don’t know where the rest of it went,” said Dillon. One of the most striking revelations in Dillon’s research isn’t Turing’s short story, but the author who most influenced his writing—Angus Wilson. Both veteran codebreakers, the two became aware of each other through the King’s College Cambridge social scene following World War II. In July 1952, Wilson published a groundbreaking and controversial gay novel called Hemlock and After. A close read of Pryce’s Buoy shows Turing owed a huge debt to Wilson’s book. Dillon even noted he “copied” a portion of it “in many explicit ways, including replicating the order of events in the plot, reproducing the same (or very similar) phrases and diction, and adopting the narrative technique of shifting focalization which Wilson deploys throughout Hemlock and After.” However, Dillon doesn’t mean this as a negative criticism of Turing’s short story. “When you start trying your hand as a creative writer, you copy what inspires you. It’s a kind of scaffolding because writing creatively is scary,” she said. Although unfinished and unpolished, Pryce’s Buoy offers an invaluable window into one of the 20th century’s most influential—and sadly misunderstood—minds. Turing was only 41 years old when he died, and was still trying to make sense of both himself and a world that wouldn’t let him exist as he was. “Literature offered him a really powerful way of doing that,” said Dillon. “This was the moment when he really felt a release, a chance to be more creative and playful.” The post Long-lost love story by Alan Turing rediscovered in archive appeared first on Popular Science. ...read more read less