The MANIAC is a novel by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, his first written in English, published in 2023. It is a fictionalized biography of the polymath John von Neumann, whom Labatut calls “the smartest man of the 20th century”. The book goes beyond von Neumann: it also tells the story of physicist Paul Ehrenfest, the development of artificial intelligence and Lee Sedol's match against AlphaGo. The title comes from the MANIAC I computer, which was based on von Neumann architecture and built after the war at Los Alamos.
Von Neumann was a Hungarian-American polymath of Jewish descent and a child prodigy from an early age. He worked in many fields: the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, game theory and cellular automata, as well as nuclear weapons research under the Manhattan Project during World War II and the computer architecture that later took his name. Labatut was inspired to write the book by George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. He explains that he prefers writing in English because he considers the language superior to Spanish, also referring to Borges's view of its richness and physicality.
The book is divided into three chapters. The first, “Paul or the Discovery of the Irrational”, concerns Paul Ehrenfest and is written in the third person. It begins with Ehrenfest shooting and killing his son Vasily, who had Down syndrome, and then taking his own life. It then recounts the physicist's life and his relationships with his wife Tatiana, his lover Nelly Meyjes and his famous colleagues. The chapter follows his descent into despair and depression because of the breakdown of his marriage, the advent of quantum mechanics and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, before returning to the opening scene.
The second chapter, “John or the Mad Dreams of Reason”, is devoted to von Neumann and is written as a series of interviews with members of his family, wives, friends and colleagues, each with a distinct voice. It is divided into three parts. The first, “The Limits of Logic”, recounts his early life through accounts by Eugene Wigner, his mother Margit Kann, his brother Nicholas, his first wife Mariette Kövesi and scientists such as Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya and Gábor Szegő. It culminates in von Neumann's participation in David Hilbert's program to establish a logical foundation for mathematics, an effort ultimately undermined by Kurt Gödel.
The second part, “The Delicate Balance of Terror”, covers von Neumann's role in the Manhattan Project, as recounted by Richard Feynman; the development of game theory and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, as presented by Oskar Morgenstern; and the creation of the MANIAC I computer and von Neumann architecture, according to Julian Bigelow.
In the third part, “Ghosts in the Machine”, Sydney Brenner examines von Neumann's contribution to biology and his theoretical work on self-replicating and self-repairing machines, while Nils Aall Barricelli discusses his ideas about digital life and their disagreements. His second wife Klára Dán, his daughter Marina and Wigner describe his final years, personal life and death.
The third chapter, “Lee or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence”, concerns Lee Sedol's Go match against AlphaGo. Here, the narrative returns to the third person. The chapter also tells the story of Demis Hassabis, a chess prodigy who decided to pursue artificial intelligence and founded DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo.
The narrative points towards the future, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence surpass the human mind. The book ends with Lee Sedol's retirement from Go and the emergence of AlphaZero, a new version of the program that was not trained on human games but became the strongest player in Go, chess and shogi.
The book received mostly positive reviews. Tom McCarthy in The New York Times noted the ambiguity of its genre, writing that at its best “you simply throw up your hands and think: who cares what label we put on this writing? It's great”. Becca Rothfeld of The Washington Post praised the book as “a virtuoso effort, both a historical novel and a philosophical excursion”, with “a dark, otherworldly and unique beauty”, although she noted that its polyphonic structure can make it difficult to read. Killian Fox of The Guardian called it a “darkly compelling novel”, with impressive skill in explaining complex ideas.
There were reservations, however. Sam Byers of The Guardian, while praising the opening chapter as “a perfect distillation of his technique”, wrote that “a brilliant novel is not quite what we end up with”, pointing to its lack of focus: too many years in too few pages and too many voices without enough distinction. Garrett Biggs of the Chicago Review of Books found that the final chapter “falls flat” compared with the first two parts, because the history of artificial intelligence has yet to be written and the book begins to sound like a tired opinion piece. Alun David of The Jewish Chronicle found it clichéd in its thinking and style.
Several critics stressed that the book is more than a biography. Ben Cosman, in an essay in the Cleveland Review of Books, contrasts it with the film Oppenheimer and argues that it follows the development of artificial intelligence through the lives of three men. Ed Simon of the Los Angeles Review of Books reads it as a history of artificial intelligence, connecting it with the myth of the golem and Frankenstein's monster, while noting that von Neumann, despite perhaps being the century's most brilliant mind, remained obscure to the general public. He also identifies a critique by Labatut of American rationalism, utilitarianism and positivist logic.
As for the truth of the events, Labatut calls his books fiction but clarifies that “all the science is real; however, whatever a writer writes is fiction”. Killian Fox notes that the details largely agree with the history books, but the author allows himself considerable freedom to imagine these lives from within. Simon considers the book something rarer than a historical novel: an experimental novel of ideas, historical creative nonfiction or a combination of the two.
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