Will Eaves on Alan Turing; The Moon in Fiction and Poetry; Afrofuturism
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 847 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Will Eaves discusses Murmur, his award-winning novel about Alan Turing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers. |
| 0:08.0 | But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA |
| 0:12.0 | was himself an informer, a secret British army agent with the codename Stakeknife. |
| 0:18.0 | Who gets to play God? And why me? Why my family? |
| 0:21.3 | When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe? |
| 0:25.1 | I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm with the IRA. |
| 0:28.5 | Steakknife. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.5 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.5 | Where science and imagination collide today, the troubled mind of Alan Turing reimagined, |
| 0:43.4 | and Afro-futurism dissected by the Zambian writer Namwali Serpo. |
| 0:48.1 | And as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings approaches, |
| 0:52.1 | we look for the magic of the moon on the page. |
| 0:55.6 | But first, an ambitious, experimental and strangely mesmeric journey into the mind of the |
| 1:00.7 | mathematician, scientist and godfather of the computer age, Alan Turing. |
| 1:05.4 | Despite his outstanding war record, Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality, a crime at the time, and sentenced to |
| 1:12.4 | chemical castration as an alternative to a prison sentence. Murma, by Will Eves, the winner of this |
| 1:18.9 | year's welcome book prize, imagines the last two years of Turing's life as he experiences the |
| 1:24.2 | debilitating and destructive effects on his mind of the hormone injections. |
| 1:29.1 | I won't lie. It's a complicated, intense immersion into the mind of a genius from an award-winning |
| 1:35.3 | writer who edges towards that description himself. Well, I'm saying that, and it is a huge |
| 1:41.1 | compliment, obviously will, but super science, deep philosophy and daunting maths. |
... |
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