A dizzying novel about the limits of thought and the delusions of reason.

A disturbing triptych about the dreams of the 20th century and the nightmares of the 21st century, MANIAC explores the limits of reason, tracing the path from the foundations of mathematics to the delusions of artificial intelligence. Guided by the enigmatic figure of John von Neumann, a modern Prometheus who did more than anyone to create the world we inhabit and anticipate the future that is coming, in this book Benjamín Labatut immerses himself in the firestorms of atomic bombs, in the deadly strategies of the Cold War and the birth of the digital universe.

The work begins with a gunshot: in 1933 Paul Ehrenfest, Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, ended the life of his own son before committing suicide, convinced that the soul of science had been corrupted by the same evil that drove the rise of Nazism. Some of Ehrenfest's fears come true in the volume's central character, the Hungarian mathematician von Neumann, a being endowed with a brain so extraordinary that his colleagues considered it the next step in human evolution.

During a meteoric career, von Neumann laid the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped design nuclear bombs, developed game theory, and created the first modern computer. At the end of his life, already converted into a key cog in the military-industrial complex, he gave free rein to a creative impulse that led him to contemplate ideas that could threaten the primacy of our species: "There is no cure for progress," he said. after heralding the arrival of an essential singularity, a turning point in history beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.

MANIAC culminates with the battle between a man and a machine: Lee Sedol, grandmaster of Go, challenges the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in five agonizing games that serve as a warning about the challenges we will have to face as our creations technologies acquire greater and greater independence.

After that unclassifiable phenomenon that was Un verdor terrible, MANIAC confirms Benjamín Labatut as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.

«Monstrously good. “It reads like a dark foundational myth about modern technology, but with the pace of a thriller” (Mark Haddon).

«The voice of Labatut comes from the future to free us from the curse of our present» (Wolfram Eilenberger).

«Brilliant, quirky in the best sense of the word. He leaves you breathless »(Sasha Marianna Salzmann).

«Labatut is that increasingly rare phenomenon: a contemporary writer of exciting originality. Even more than A Terrible Greenery, MANIAC is a work of dark, haunting and singular beauty” (Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post).