I understand there was an apparent plagiarism issue with this book but I can't find a lot about it online so I'm just not going to focus on it in the review. I am going to look up the author who sued though and read his own work eventually. And I don't know nearly enough about the Spanish Revolution of 1936 so I need to find books on that as well.

I really got attached to this story and the characters quickly. The prose was fluid and engaging, the author set up 1930s England very well, the character Brian had a clear voice. The supporting characters are great- I loved Lil, I loved Lucy and her Parisian lesbian escapades, Louise was fun, I wish we got to see more of Philippa's sexuality exploration. I got very invested in Brian and Edward's relationship (and extremely frustrated the more Brian slept around (though of course, there's a history here with promiscuity by necessity that I don't want non-gay men criticizing honestly)), which is built up through maybe 3/4 of the novel before the climatic plot moment described in the synopses, where Edward runs off to Spain.

And then... it kind of fell apart. I got less interested the more overwrought it became. When it became obvious that Edward was going to die well before the end, and the last few chapters were Brian grieving I just... lost a lot of interest. I'm so burnt out on stories with gay characters that end tragically like this. I did only set it aside for a few hours before finishing the rest but it was a major let down. Also, after that rant Nigel gives Brian in the very beginning of the story, I can't understand why they hook up afterwards. It felt like a 180 change of personality.

Some bullet point issues I feel are pertinent to address:

-There's one single mention of anything related to transgender people in the entire book, and it's a single line afforded to a 'transvestite whore' that emphasizes the falseness of her eyelashes and her breasts. As if fiction didn't hyper-fixate on how different transgender people are from cisgender people enough, or put trans women into the roles of prostitutes enough. (And you can say, but a transvestite isn't a transgender person! And I will say, the history of conflating them is long, in fact before transsexual existed the only word we had was transvestite.)

-There's one single mention of a Jewish character in the whole book, when the story takes place in the 1930s and frequently references of the horrors of the Third Reich and holocaust, and that Jewish character is a greedy, amoral banker. Does no one see the issue here?

-There are NO people of color, except for a once-mentioned Ethiopian man who Brian apparently has a fling with. He's not named, he's just a description of traits in a list of men. Considering the setting- 1930s London, which has always been a diverse city, a focus on the Communist movement, where working-class people of color would have been involved- there should be way more people of color involved in the story.

This is a tough book for me to review, because at least 50% of it went in one ear and out the other. Don't get me wrong, it was interesting, it's just that I couldn't follow a lot of it.

Part of the problem was the diagrams. I'm pretty sure there were a lot of them, especially in the first half of the book, and the poor narrator had to read all of it out loud. I have a feeling that, even if I weren't a more visual learner, I still would have had trouble following the various long series of letters or numbers used to demonstrate Turing's ideas.

The other problem was that the first half of the book didn't seem to have a solid organizational structure. The author would discuss people or ideas that didn't seem to have much connection to Turing, then move onto another subject, and then another. It was interesting stuff, but I had trouble seeing how it all connected.

Thankfully, the latter half was much less confusing. I enjoyed the sections on Turing's cryptography work during World War II, and I loved the sections near the end on Turing's ideas about machine learning and artificial intelligence. While I didn't always agree with his theories about how a machine might best be taught, which were based on old-fashioned child rearing techniques (and which I recognize would not necessarily have been considered old-fashioned from his perspective), I found his way of thinking about machines to be fascinating.

He questioned the prevailing tendency to take human superiority for granted. Others repeatedly stated that machines could never be equal to or more superior than humans for various reasons: they would never enjoy the taste of strawberries and cream, never write a sonnet, never listen to a piece of music and feel moved, and never fall in love or cause someone else to fall in love with them. Turing refuted many of these statements and questioned the importance of others. For example, someone probably could create a machine that could enjoy the taste of strawberries and cream, but why would anyone want to do that? The bit about sonnets inspired one of my favorite quotes: “A sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by a machine.” To his mind, machines would have a way of viewing and appreciating the world that would likely be different from, rather than inferior to, the way humans would view and appreciate it.

He was also adamant that, when judging machines' intelligence and ability to think, they not be held to higher standards than humans. Humans require training and education before they can properly perform new tasks, and it's accepted that humans will occasionally make mistakes. Why shouldn't machines be given a similar amount of leeway?

I did think that Turing's “imitation game,” which has come to be called the Turing test, contradicted some of his other ideas, since it was based on a machine's ability to convince a human interrogator that it was human. Rather than accepting the idea that a machine's thought processes and ability to appreciate the world would probably be different from a human's, the Turing test brings us back to the idea of human superiority – a machine could only be said to “think” if it could imitate a human being enough to be mistaken for one.

I had thought this book would contain more biographical information than it did, but it was really more about Turing's ideas. The one aspect of Turing's personal life that the author did frequently write about was his homosexuality. The book briefly mentioned that he might not have been permitted to do cryptanalysis work at Bletchley Park if the government had known he was gay, and I was a little amazed that they didn't know, since he seemed to be fairly open about it. I have a feeling that the only reason he kept out of trouble for so long was because he was quiet, shy, and socially awkward. Although I knew from the start of the book that things wouldn't end well for Turing, the final section of the book, on his ill-fated relationship with Arnold Murray, his conviction for gross indecency, the estrogen injections that he was given to “cure” him of his homosexuality, and his eventual suicide (the author also briefly brings up the possibility that Turing was assassinated), was heartbreaking.

And here I thought this was going to be a short review. Anyway, the first half of this book was a mess and would probably have been better in paper or e-book form. The second half of the book was much better and made up for the first half somewhat. According to several reviews, Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma is overall a much better book, so I may see about reading it (or, more likely, listening to it) at some point in the future.

Additional Comments:

I enjoyed Paul Michael Garcia's narration, but the audio quality was very uneven, sometimes noticeably changing in the middle of a sentence.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

"Not surprisingly, Jefferson got the last word, a remark to the effect that he would not be willing to believe a computing machine could think until he saw it touch the leg of a lady computing machine."

 

Ugh, Jefferson. No.

"A sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine." - Turing

 

 

 

 

It's fascinating hearing about Turing's attempts to advocate for giving machines something similar to the amount of leeway we give humans. For example, we don't expect humans to know how to do things without first getting some kind of training or instruction, and we don't expect humans to always get everything right.

 

But yeah, now the author has gotten to Turing's ideas on how a machine might be taught, and it's old fashioned child rearing strategies, with some form of punishment being viewed as better and more effective at inspiring change and growth in the machine than praise. As far as this part goes, I prefer Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects.