Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of
Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's
Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction “Captivating
and unclassifiable at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a
writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark eerie and singular beauty.” —
The Washington Post “Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding heady narrative that is
addictively interesting.” — Wall Street Journal 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 work of beauty and fabulous momentum The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we
face as a species.
