Alan Turing produced an untitled, unfinished six-page handwritten short story in late 1952 or early 1953. The work, often referred to as Pryce's Buoy, offers a fresh view of a man better known for his codebreaking and foundational contributions to computing and artificial intelligence.
The manuscript sits in the Turing Collection at King's College, Cambridge, where it carries the catalogue reference AMT/A/13 and forms part of the publicly accessible Turing Digital Archive. Until recently the piece had received only limited scholarly attention. Sarah Dillon, professor of literature at the University of Cambridge, completed the first full transcription and published her detailed examination in The Review of English Studies this year.
The story is autofictional. Its central character, Alec Pryce, stands in for Turing himself. The narrative follows a working-class figure named Ron Miller and builds toward a potential sexual encounter. Written in the months after Turing's March 1952 conviction for gross indecency, the tale appears less than a year before his death in 1954 at the age of 41.
Dillon's analysis traces clear literary debts to Angus Wilson's 1952 novel Hemlock and After. Shared phrases, similar ordering of plot elements and parallel narrative techniques link the two texts. These connections place Turing's fragment within the literary currents of its immediate period rather than treating it as isolated personal writing.
The timing matters. Turing had faced prosecution for an encounter with Arnold Murray in Manchester the previous year. Offered chemical castration in place of prison, he continued his intellectual work under that shadow. The short story does not present him as the solitary genius of popular accounts. Instead it shows a writer who confronted his circumstances with humour and directness.
Defiance through fiction
Primary sources of this kind anchor historical judgment in evidence rather than later myth-making. Turing's wartime service at Bletchley Park, where he helped crack the Enigma machine, already marks him as a central figure in the technological heritage that underpins modern computing. The rediscovered fragment adds another dimension: an individual who refused to let legal persecution define or silence his creative output.
