Review: Janna Levin, “A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines”
Here’s your warning: I’m about to go all fangirl on Janna Levin . Having a PhD in Physics would have been enough of a reason, but I found out about this book first.
Yesterday, when I opened Janna Levin’s "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" to the first page, my first thought was that it was as dense as Neal Stephenson’s "Cryptonomicon" . I read each of Levin’s introductory sentences twice, three times, before the meaning sank into my head. I thought it would require the same kind of focus as Stephenson’s book, which took me years to finally read, but something about the way Levin crafts a phrase made me read just a bit more, then a little more, until I was hooked and dropped nearly everything so that I could finish it.
Levin’s historical novel is, for lack of a more literary description, achingly beautiful. She juxtaposes Alan Turing’s scientific genius and social innocence with Kurt Gödel’s mathematical brilliance and personal inadequacies in such a way that it made me feel their discomfort as my own, even if I couldn’t identify with their mental prowess. What’s interesting is that, even though they met in real life, and though this book is about the similarities of their lives, Levin never puts them face to face. Even the natural timeline is fluid in this book, jumping back in time to their origins, then ahead 20 years, then back again.
That Turing and Gödel are misfits is clear from the beginning, but that doesn’t change their core humanity in Levin’s eyes. She begins:
"Their genius is a testament to our own worth, an antidote to insignificance; and their bounteous flaws are luckless but seemingly natural complements, as though greatness can be doled out only with an equal measure of weakness."
We know from the onset where Turing and Gödel will end up; history has covered that. And we know that each is a genius who contributed a jarring breakthrough in his own sphere of study. What Levin does, however, is tie them together in a way that speaks to all of us who question our own contributions and our own greatness. She even intersperses herself into the story if only to say that perhaps there is no connection, but that’s not the case at all:
"I am here in the middle of an unfinished story. I used to believe that one day I would come to some kind of conclusion…But that will never happen…We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy….A declaration that we were down here on this crowded, lonely planet…that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once."
While this book refers constantly to Gödel’s and Turing’s work respectively, I could keep up with it even though I still have only a basic idea of what they were working on. Folks who have no mathematics or science background will be able to keep up with it just fine. And if you do have experience with those subjects, I think you’ll enjoy the book as well. This book speaks to the human experience with the unknown and unknowable, whatever they might be. Its message can be applied to anything humankind strives to understand, but whose meaning is just outside of our reach. While that inability to understand might have been difficult for Turing and Gödel to accept, perhaps it is something the rest of us can turn into a strength.
Levin’s style is engaging, and brilliant. Buy this book new and set aside some time to immerse yourself in it.
Related posts:
- WomenInScience: IEEE Spectrum Radio Interviews Dr. Janna Levin
- More Janna Levin, Now For Your Ears
- Review: Ann Aguirre’s “Grimspace”
- Review: Maureen McHugh’s “Half The Day Is Night”
- Review: Elizabeth Moon’s “Marque And Reprisal”
