The MANIAC

From one of literature’s most exciting new voices, a story centered around one of the great geniuses of the modern age, the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the uncanny circuit of his mind deep into our own time’s most haunting dilemmas.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took modern science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a masterpiece on an even more epic scale, with the protean figure of John von Neumann in its foreground.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people that surrounded him from his early school days until the end of his life, von Neumann transformed every field he touched, essentially inventing the game theory, the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. He was a paradoxical character, at times childish and amoral, at times wise and astonishingly far-seeing.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych bookended by a suicidal Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, and the matchup between a Korean Go master and an artificial intelligence system, both artfully connected to the main section, which presents the astounding life and ideas of von Neumann through a chorus of family members and friends, as well as gifted scientists, such as Richard Feynman, Theodore von Karman, and Eugene Wigner, who outline the evolution of a mind beyond any we have known, and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.
The MANIAC begins in Europe, in the 1930s, with the story of a brilliant and tortured Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, one of Einstein’s closest friends, who fell into despair when he looked at the darkness slowly enveloping the world as mathematics invaded physics and science and technology became tyrannical forces; it ends almost a hundred years later, as we witness the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter that showcases the limits of human and non-human creativity and embodies the central question of von Neumann’s most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence that could evolve beyond our understanding or control.
A work of staggering beauty and momentum, The MANIAC brings us, head and heart, into contact with the deepest questions we face as a species.