MANIAC

Three Movements

MANIAC opens with Paul Ehrenfest — the Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein who shot his Down’s syndrome son and then himself in 1933, unable to reconcile his scientific life with the world it was producing. The book then moves to its central subject: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American mathematician who may have been the most purely intelligent person of the 20th century, and who contributed more to the atomic bomb, to game theory, to early computing, and to the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics than perhaps any other single mind.

The book closes with Go — the 2016 match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, the world’s greatest Go player, in which the machine won and played moves in game two that Go masters are still trying to understand.

The Argument

Labatut is interested in what happens when human intelligence reaches its own limits and then surpasses them — by building instruments, weapons, and eventually machines that exceed the capacity of the minds that created them. Von Neumann is the pivot: a person so intelligent that he frightened other geniuses, who worked with complete lucidity on projects that would produce the most destructive weapon in human history.

The AlphaGo section asks a question that the von Neumann section sets up: when a machine plays a move that no human would play and that turns out to be correct, what does correct mean? Is there a logic beyond human logic? And if so, what do we do with the fact that we built it?

The Chorus Around von Neumann

The structural masterstroke of MANIAC is how Labatut renders its central figure. Rather than giving us von Neumann’s own interior voice, he assembles the book’s long middle section from the testimonies of the people who orbited him — his wives, his daughter, his Los Alamos colleagues, rivals like Eugene Wigner and Richard Feynman, the men and women who loved, feared, and were dazzled by him. The result is a portrait built entirely from reflections, a genius glimpsed only in the disturbances he left in others. This polyphonic method lets Labatut suggest something he could never state directly: that von Neumann’s frictionless brilliance, his ability to reason without flinching about the bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and self-replicating machines, was itself a kind of inhumanity. The man who helped invent game theory and the modern computer emerges as both the apex of human reason and a warning about where pure reason, unmoored from feeling, can lead.

A New Kind of Fact-Fiction

Born in Rotterdam and raised in Latin America, the Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut works in a genre largely of his own making — a hybrid of meticulous historical research and novelistic invention in which the seams are deliberately hidden. MANIAC expands the method he pioneered in When We Cease to Understand the World, his breakout work shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, where the lives of real scientists shade imperceptibly into imagined interiority. Readers who insist on a firm boundary between what happened and what Labatut has dreamed will be unsettled, and that unsettlement is intentional: the blurring mirrors his subject, the way scientific knowledge itself outruns human comprehension. The book asks us to hold accuracy and invention in the same uneasy suspension that its scientists hold creation and destruction.

The AlphaGo Coda and the Question of the Future

The final movement leaps forward to 2016 and the match between Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and the Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, and it transforms the whole book in retrospect. Von Neumann had dreamed of machines that might one day think; here is one that does something stranger — it plays Move 37 in the second game, a move so alien that commentators assumed an error, and that turns out to be a stroke of inhuman genius. Labatut lets the reader feel the vertigo of watching a created intelligence reason in ways its makers cannot follow. The coda reframes the von Neumann material as prophecy: the same lucid, world-altering intelligence that built the bomb has now built something that may, in time, exceed us entirely. It is a deeply ambivalent ending, awed and afraid in equal measure.

Who Should Read It

MANIAC will reward readers of literary fiction who are unafraid of difficulty, anyone fascinated by the history of twentieth-century science, and those wrestling with the implications of artificial intelligence in our own moment. It pairs naturally with When We Cease to Understand the World and with biographies of the Los Alamos generation. Approach it not as a tidy nonfiction account but as a meditation that uses real lives to think about genius, annihilation, and the things humanity builds that it cannot control. Read slowly, surrender the need for a clean factual ledger, and let the book’s disquiet settle — it is meant to linger.

A Book Sharpened by Its Moment

Few novels have arrived so precisely on time. Published in 2023, just as large language models and generative systems thrust artificial intelligence into the center of public anxiety, MANIAC reads as if Labatut had been waiting for the culture to catch up to his preoccupations. The book’s lineage — from the physicists who unleashed nuclear fission, through von Neumann’s foundational work on computing and self-replicating automata, to a Go-playing machine that reasons beyond human ken — traces a single unbroken thread of human ingenuity racing ahead of human wisdom. That timeliness has made the novel a touchstone in conversations among technologists and ethicists as much as among literary readers, and it explains why it appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists and cemented Labatut’s reputation as one of the essential writers on science and dread. The book does not predict the future so much as illuminate the temperament that keeps building it, and in an age of accelerating machine intelligence that illumination feels less like history than like an urgent mirror held up to the present.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Labatut’s most ambitious work: a meditation on genius, destruction, and the thing we have made that is beginning to think.

Reading Guides

• When We Cease to Understand the World — Full Review