The Maniac
Checking Availibility...Description
From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI
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 science to strange and 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 and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and 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 and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and 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 world of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
About this Author
BENJAMlN LABATUT is a Chilean author born in The Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of Antarctica starts here (2009), a short story collection, After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical and historical notes on the void, The Stone of Madness (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos and modernity, and When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book which explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over 30 languages.
Reviews
Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly and the Washington Post, and a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, the Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, and the New York Public Library
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023
"Like Labatut's last book, When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), The MANIAC is captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray. Its resident genius is the polymath and pioneering computer scientist John von Neumann, who displays 'a sinister, machinelike intelligence.' The book's many narrators offer a polyphonic portrait of the brilliant, frustrating von Neumann, and its extraordinary final segment brings us to the wonder and potential danger of artificial intelligence. Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty."
--Washington Post
"Intoxicating . . . this marvel of a book, which inspires awe and dread in equal measure, is stalked by the greatest terrors of the 20th century, yet its final heart-stopping sentence makes clear the greatest terrors are yet to come."
--Daily Mail
"Utterly absorbing . . . The book drives at the amorality with which von Neumann and his brilliant cohort set humanity on an apocalyptic path . . . [A] terrifying sense of skirting the abyss."
--Sunday Times
"Monstrously good . . . Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller."
--Mark Haddon
"As addictive as a true crime tale."
--Mail on Sunday
"[Labatut] is fast emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges . . . There is no one writing like him anywhere in the world."
--The Telegraph
"Both entertains and provokes . . . His infernal vision of science captures something of the unsettling vertigo of living right here in the Anthropocene after all."
--TLS
"Labatut elegantly captures the sense of geniuses outstripping the typical boundaries of intellectual achievement and paying a price for it . . . Sharply written fiction ably capturing primitive emotions and boundary-breaking research."
--Kirkus Reviews
"After the slender yet incendiary When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut returns with a sensational epic of the Hungarian American physicist and computer scientist John von Neumann . . . Labatut mesmerizes in his accessible depictions of complex scientific material and in his inspired portraits of the innovators. In his previous book, Labatut grappled with the ways in which scientific breakthroughs offered new means of experiencing reality; this one succeeds at showing how acts of genius might break the world forever. Readers won't be able to turn away." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"Labatut has created his own genre: fictionalized accounts of great minds in the history of science, whose genius drives them to madness . . . The MANIAC charts the sweep of modern computing, from its first inklings in punched cards used in jacquard textile looms, all the way to dramatic confrontations between artificial intelligence and acclaimed masters of chess and Go. Labatut's prose is lucid and compelling, drawing readers on a frightening but fascinating journey; even the most right-brained among them will gain insight into the power and potential dangers of AI. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal (starred review)
"Labatut's voice comes from the future, to free us from the curse of our present."
--Wolfram Eilenberger, author of Time of the Magicians
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
