The Maniac

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World  electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize & National Book Award finalist, & one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life & thought of a clutch of mathematicians & physicists who took science to strange & sometimes dangerous new realms. In The Maniac, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory & the first programable computer, & pioneering AI, digital life, & cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, & rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched & of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science & technology become tyrannical forces; it ends 100 years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol & the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty & fabulous momentum, The Maniac confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding & offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.