THE MANIAC

Lightly fictionalized studies of envelope-pushing science and its consequences.

Much like Chilean author Labatut’s excellent When We Cease To Understand the World (2021), this novel turns on brilliant minds leading troubled lives. First in its triptych of profiles is Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who killed his son with Down syndrome before killing himself. (Labatut notes that among Ehrenfest’s scholarly interests was turbulence.) The second and most substantive concerns Johnny von Neumann, a prodigiously brilliant Hungarian physicist and mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project and spearheaded a host of developments in quantum mechanics and computing. The book’s title refers to MANIAC, a successor to the pioneering computer ENIAC, though as von Neumann’s broken relationships and decline become clear, the title becomes double-edged. The third section moves closer to the present day and concerns Lee Sedol, a Korean master of the notoriously challenging board game Go; in 2016 he was defeated by AlphaGo, an AI program, leaving him so devastated he retired from the game. In each section, but especially the latter two, Labatut elegantly captures the sense of geniuses outstripping the typical boundaries of intellectual achievement and paying a price for it. In Sedol’s case, his matches with AlphaGo are characterized not simply as man-versus-machine battles, but a hint of what an AI–driven future might look like; they were “casting a new and terrible beauty, a logic more powerful than reason.” Labatut can approach this with a certain optimism about the magic of unfettered genius. (Sections narrated by physicist Richard Feynman lighten the tone.) But the prevailing mood is dread; as Labatut tracks the ethical debates regarding the A-bomb and the impact of AlphaGo’s triumph, he sounds a concern that humanity is engineering its undoing.

Sharply written fiction ably capturing primitive emotions and boundary-breaking research.