Mari Saario: The Gospel According to Turing
(Cosmos Pen 3/03)

Mari Saario has been writing short stories to Finnish sf fanzines for a few years now. Her first works already showed promise, the constructive elements were good, but the realisation was left halfway. She has since then developed fast and won the year 2000 Nova short story contest with the story Korttelitanssi (The Square Dance), and in the year 2001 her – so far perhaps the best – short story Ankka multiversumissa (The Duck in the Multiverse) achieved second place in the Portti short story contest.

Saario's The Gospel According to Turing is an internet-era portrayal of a person's relation to God and belief.  The protagonist accidentally finds God's e-mail address. The story is pleasantly compact and approaches its ideas directly. The story is in no way allegorical; the e-mail is here just the method of telling with concrete concepts about a very esoteric subject.
 
Considering its short length, the story presents a huge amount of sore religious spots and philosophical reflection. One wonders whether the story might have been written in a greater length, given more action. Perhaps so, but The Gospel According to Turing works rather well even as this kind of an humorous essay text.

The story doesn't answer the question where I immediately started to expect an answer: would God pass the Turing test as a person? But that is another story. Saario's story answers the questions it sets itself just as satisfactorily as can be expected in the questions of religious belief.

Jarmo Karonen
(Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho)