LGBT+ History Month 2018 – What Alan Turing Means to Me

‘The alchemist took logical principles, wire, and electronic circuits, and made a machine. The knight defended the right of that machine to a future. If only he had been able to save himself.’ – The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt

It was brought to my attention through this excellent post by the YABookers that this month is LGBT+ History Month in the UK, (it occurs at different times depending on what country you’re in) and it go me thinking about prominent LGBT+ historical figures. It was that that I realised that this was the time to talk about, what is for me, one of the most tragic loses from the 20th century, and one that is very close to my heart. 

The story of the Bletchley Park code-breakers is one that is familiar to many of us thanks to recent dramatisations such as ‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘Enigma’, and it is a story that captured my attention like no other when I was a teenager just getting in to history. Alan’s story may also be familiar to you, but it remained hidden for a long time, and Alan never knew the impact he had on modern computing, never mind his impact on post war England.  So, for those interested, here is a little bit about Alan and why we should remember him this month. 

A Cambridge maths graduate and professor, Turing’s mind was a one-in-a-generation occurrence, resulting in his recruitment to Bletchley Park to play a part in the breaking of the German Enigma code in World War Two. Nicknamed ‘The Unbreakable Code’ Bletchey’s code-breakers worked tirelessly to break a code, the likes of which had never been seen before. But only Turing realised that only a machine would be able to break the work of another machine. The ‘Turing Machine’, a device built by hand from scratch by Turing himself, was the first incarnation of the modern computer, and his work eventually helped to break the Enigma code and win the war over Germany. It was estimated that the work of the code-breakers shortened the war by around two years saving 14 million lives.

So why write about Turing? Well, Turing was a gay man living in the 1940s, a time of mass gay persecution, and a man who underwent chemical castration to avoid going to jail for his sexuality, and to be able to continue his work on his machines. The toll of this however resulted in Turing’s suicide and, just because he was homosexual, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century was lost, which to me, is desperately sad. Especially sad considering his contributions to science, computing, and the war effort. Who knows if we would be more advanced in the field of computing now had Turing lived (although I’m willing to bet that we would be), but I for one am incredibly sad, and angry, that he endured such an experience just because of his sexual preference. We still have a way to go in the acceptance of LGBT+ people, but we should also celebrate how far we have come since the times that Turing lived in.

Turing received a full pardon from the Queen in 2013, but it was too late to bring back Turing’s brilliant mind, and this quote from David Leavitt’s book ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ is one that has always stuck with me. Leavitt writes that often people are hounded because of their discoveries…’Turing was hounded in spite of it.’

If you want to read more on this subject, I’ll leave some book recs below, but if this particular area of study doesn’t float your boat, then check out these recommendations by the YABookers. 

Until Next Time x

Book Recommendations on Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma code: 

• The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt
• The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay 
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
• The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop
• Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn 
• Enigma by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore 
• The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay 

Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

My Rating: ★★

17 years ago, a young girl named Rose fell through the ground in the Black Hills and found herself in an underground chamber filled with gleaming symbols, lying in the palm of a giant metal hand. Now a physicist, Rose leads a research team struggling to determine the hand’s origins. When another giant limb is discovered, she quickly devises a method for unearthing the hidden pieces, convinced there is an entire body out there waiting to be found.

I’m going to be frank. I didn’t enjoy reading this book. It started out with a premise that got me intrigued, and honestly from the prologue I thought this was going to be great! However, there were a few things that totally spoiled it for me. 

Firstly, the story is told in a series of interviews, case files, and journal entries, which I have no problem with as long as its the best way the get the story across. Which, in this case, it wasn’t. I understand that it was done this way in order to appear more ‘scientific’ but it made reading the book an incredibly stilted experience, and made it very difficult to connect with the story or the characters. If you want to set a book out like this then you have the have a strong story in order the convey the messages properly…but this book just doesn’t have that, and it’s basically just a massive dump of information rather than a story. 

Another thing I found weird, and frankly confusing at times, was the pacing. It jumps ALL OVER THE PLACE! Very uneven, difficult to follow, and not altogether clear at times. It jumps from 50 pages of rambling to loads of action crammed into 2 pages. Also, the time indicators! Some suggest that interviews take place on the same day, others over a few months, but there are no date or anything written down so it’s impossible to work out where on the timeline of the story you are! It’s infuriating.

The story never really gets resolved in anyway, there’s just a lot of roundabout answers to some half formed questions from earlier in the book. There’s a romance in the book specifically designed so that one member can be physically altered in some way. There’s a lot of jargon that is really unnecessary, and the interviewer is just annoying. Not only that but I went into this story expecting SOME form of sci-fi action, they spend a whole book building up am image of a Giant Robot which I think takes about a maximum of 50 steps throughout the whole story and barely anything else. 

Infuriating is the one word summing up of how I feel about this book, and it’s part of a series, which doesn’t surprise me at all. It dragged on and on with no specific conclusion, and for this reason I doubt that I’ll be hurrying to buy the next ones.

That being said, you should really make your own mind up about this book as there are a lot of people who really enjoyed it, so either read it or if you have read it, let me know what you thought! 

Until Next Time x