The Turing Test

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Special thanks to David Pringle and Lee Montgomerie, formerly of Interzone, whose rejection letters 18 years ago were so detailed that they were almost a correspondence course and so encouraging that I kept on sending stories in. And to Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Andy Cox, Jetse De Vries and not least Andrew Hook. The people who edit and publish magazines and anthologies, frequently for minimal reward, are the ones who make it possible for people like me to think of ourselves as writers. Which means a huge amount to us. For some strange reason.

I can well remember the day I first encountered Ellie because it was a particularly awful one. I run a London gallery specialising in contemporary art, which means of course that I deal largely in human body parts, and it was the day we conceded a court case – and a very large sum of money – in connection with a piece entitled ‘Soul Sister’.

You may have heard about it. We’d taken the piece from the up and coming ‘wild man of British art’, George Linderman. It was very well reviewed and we looked like making a good sale until it came out that George had obtained its main component – the severed head of an old woman – by bribing a technician at a medical school. Someone had recognised the head in the papers and, claiming to be related to its former owner, had demanded that it be returned to them for burial.

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