The MANIAC

From 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 AIJohn von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction.

In The MANIAC, Benjamin Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.


About the Author :
Benjamin Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 and grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires and Lima. When We Cease to Understand the World, his first book to be translated into English, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Labatut lives with his family in Santiago, Chile.

Review :
'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' - Mark Haddon

'Labatut's voice comes from the future, to free us from the curse of our present' - Wolfram Eilenberger, author of 'Time of the Magicians'


'Darkly intelligent and feverishly propulsive' - Observer


'Brooding, heady... addictively interesting... gripping, provocative' - Wall Street Journal


'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


'You just throw up your hands and think, Who cares what discourse label we assign this stuff? It's great...' - New York Times


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


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


'Captivating' - Irish Times


'Thrilling - and chilling [...] A gripping read.' - Marie Claire, Best Books of 2023


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


'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


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


'Absorbing... perfect for anyone thirsting for more nuclear anxiety after watching Oppenheimer... reads like the physicist Carlo Rovelli crossed with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft' - Chris Power, Sunday Times


'Both entertains and provokes... [Labatut's] infernal vision of science captures something of the unsettling vertigo of living right here in the Anthropocene after all' - TLS


'Emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... there is no one writing like him anywhere in the world' - Interview in the Telegraph


'Brilliantly cerebral'- 5* Sunday Telegraph




'Praise for' - When We Cease to Understand the World:


'A monstrous and brilliant book' - Philip Pullman
'Mesmerising and revelatory' - William Boyd