the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI 'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark Haddon John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - thought he might represent the next step in human evolution. After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close 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. Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.

"Brilliantly cerebral" - Sunday Telegraph (five stars)

"[Labatut] is fast emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... There is no one writing like him anywhere in the world" - Telegraph

"Reads like physicist Carlo Rovelli crossed with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft" - Sunday Times

"Imaginatively told through the fictionalised personal testimony of von Neumann's friends and family, the novel is as engrossing as it is disturbing" - Financial Times, Books of the Year

"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

"Darkly intelligent and feverishly propulsive" - Observer

"Talent, ambition, skill, intelligence - [are] present in abundance" - Guardian, Book of the Day

"Virtuosic... Labatut is that vanishingly uncommon thing: a contemporary writer of thrilling originality... The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty" - Washington Post

"A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting... gripping, provocative" - Wall Street Journal

"A dark, strange novel by a rising literary star" - New Scientist

"Captivating" - Irish Times

"In fictionalising the history of the atomic bomb, Labatut has landed on a chilling way to dramatise our contemporary fears. Science Fiction-tinged nightmares about new nuclear threats and an alien, self-learning system of intelligence are made both more real and understandable through the voices of the people who gave birth to them" - Literary Review

"Thrilling - and chilling... A gripping read" - Marie Claire, Best Books of 2023

"A necessary book, a harrowing one, and it will change the way you look at the world around you" - LitHub

"As addictive as a true crime tale" - Mail on Sunday

"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

"The MANIAC works as a novel primarily due to Benjamin Labatut's mastery of prose" - Irish Business Post

"Labatut is very good on making science exciting... less through their technical details than by expressing the human experience of ignorance being swept away, with wonder put in its place" - The Critic

"If you've yet to sample Labatut, stop wasting time. Get on the Labatut train" - BookMunch