468 | 42 TURING’S lEGACy
evidence, apart from letters written in 1930 at the time of Morcom’s sudden death. In a letter to
Morcom’s mother Turing said that he had worshipped the ground Morcom trod on, and in his
grief and distress the seventeen-year-old seems to have felt that his dead friend was somehow
still helping and encouraging him. Three days after the devastating news of the death he wrote
to his mother Sara:^18
I feel sure that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere and that there will be some work for us
to do together as I believed there was for us to do here. Now that I am left to do it alone I must
not let him down.
The 2014 Hollywood movie The Imitation Game^19 portrayed Turing as naming both his
bombe and his post-war computer ‘Christopher’, and as saying about the latter machine that
‘Christopher’s become so smart’. In fact, the film’s scriptwriter concoted all this. McCarthy too
takes a wild speculative leap when he says that Turing’s ‘investigations into whether machines
could think’ flowed from his relationship with Morcom; and even the more modest speculation
that Morcom and his early death in some way significantly influenced Turing’s adult life and
work goes well beyond the known facts.
Turing novels have become almost a mini-genre. Amy Thomson’s award-winning 1993 sci-
ence fiction story Virtual Girl featured an AI named ‘Turing’. Robert Harris’s excellent 1995
codebreaking novel Enigma was inspired by Turing, and the character Tom Jericho—who in
the novel is Turing’s student at Cambridge—is loosely based on Turing. Neal Stephenson’s
geeky bestseller Cryptonomicon from 1999 featured a fictionalized Turing who, among other
adventures, invents the Turing machine, breaks codes, and has a love affair with Third Reich
codebreaker Rudy von Hacklheber. The following year Paul Leonard’s The Turing Test buddied
up Turing with the BBC’s sci-fi icon Doctor Who: at Bletchley Park Turing is unable to break
strange new coded messages emanating from Germany, but with the Doctor’s help everything
is possible. Charles Stross’s 2001 The Atrocity Archive related how Turing proved a theorem that
threatened to undermine most of modern cryptography. The theorem, quickly hushed up by
the authorities, not only showed that the Church–Turing thesis is false (see Chapter 41) but
also solved the famous P = NP problem in complexity theory—in reality the most important
unsolved problem of modern computer science.
In 2005 the theme of Turing-as-AI appeared again, this time in Christos Papadimitriou’s
Turing (A Novel About Computation). The best parts of this book are the lectures on computa-
tion that the Turing AI gives. The AI at times resembles Papadimitriou, himself a charismatic
lecturer and computer science professor at Berkeley. Disappointingly Turing appears in the
2007 Bolivian cyberpunk novel Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan mainly as the nick-
name of the novel’s hero, Miguel ‘Turing’ Saenz; but both Turing and Gödel appear as them-
selves in Janna Levin’s 2007 novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Gödel, not looking
any more dreamy than usual, has the cover.
Chris Beckett’s 2008 book The Turing Test is a collection of fourteen science fiction stories
dwelling on AI’s relationship with humanity. In Nas Hedron’s 2012 cyberpunk novel Luck +
Death at the Edge of the World Turing, an AI with emotions, is eventually decommissioned by
the authorities. Rudi Rucker’s 2012 beatnik sci-fi novel Turing & Burroughs begins with the
Kjell crisis (see Chapter 4) but the secret service’s attempt to poison Turing with cyanide fails
through sheer chance. Escaping his poisoned-icon destiny Turing goes on to become the lover
of beat-generation hero William Burroughs. David Lagercrantz’s gloomy 2015 thriller Fall of
Man in Wilmslow is very different. With a bitten apple on the cover, the book begins with the