If someone were to demand an answer to the question, “who was the smartest man of the twentieth century,” the average person would probably remark that it was Albert Einstein. If they were philosophically inclined, they might instead offer up Martin Heidegger, or if they were disposed more toward math, Andrew Wiles. Benjamin Labatut, with his 2023 novel The Maniac, however, offers a no less serious contender for the title: John von Neumann, whose remarkable contributions to numerous fields of science are almost too many to count.

The Maniac carries the same name as the computer Neumann designed: MANIAC, one of the first of its kind, the sort of device that filled a room and stood lit up by ancient lights and dotted with oversize vacuum tubes. The book’s title refers to quite a bit more than that, however, as Labatut uses the name of the machine as an ironic counterpart, or perhaps a metaphorical device, to depict the mania that consumed the twentieth century and beyond.

The Edge of Unreason

The Maniac begins, however, not with Neumann but rather with a murder-suicide: Paul Ehrenfest, the theoretical physicist ended both his own life and that of his son, a boy who suffered from a severe case of Downs Syndrome. This segment, no longer than about twenty-five pages, forms a sort of prologue to the work as a whole. Introduced are a few background characters to the life to come, such as Einstein, but in terms of explicit dramatis personae, Ehrenfest’s prologue is, like the final section of the book, a distinct narrative.

Labatut uses this brief account of Ehrenfest’s life to depict a deeply unhappy individual. The Ehrenfest of The Maniac is a physicist, a professor, a mentor, a father, an atheist, an adulterer, a madman, and eventually, a filicidal murderer. He was close friends with some of the fathers of theoretical physics, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Moreover, being Jewish and an academic during the interwar period in Germany, he was also keenly aware of the Nazi party—a rise which directly contributed to an ongoing and persistent neurosis which no doubt fueled the motivation for his eventual demise.

To illustrate his neurosis, during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Ehrenfest wrote to a friend and fellow physicist,

with a macabre plot to shock German society out of its Nazi-induced trance: “What if a group of eminent, elderly Jewish academics and artists collectively commit suicide, without any demonstration of hatred or issuance of demands, in order to prick the German conscience?”¹

Ehrenfest’s suicidal ideation was not limited to delusional aspirations of absurd self-importance. Although he had proven himself already a capable and highly motivating mentor to—and was included in the ranks of—the world’s most influential and important theoretical physicists of the century, Labatut depicts Ehrenfest’s life and mental profile as a profoundly disturbed, unhappy and pathetic man.

At root of this prologue is Ehrenfest’s inability to see reason patterned out toward a coherent end. As will become a common theme throughout the book, Ehrenfest dispenses with the beliefs of any organized religions out of hand, attributing them to—as was common in elite circles at the time—the trite control systems of the mentally impoverished. Meanwhile, with no coherent metaphysical system underscoring the extensive advancements in physics at the time, as well as the coming danger of uncertainty in mathematics, the systems of order so readily apparent for study, the reasonableness of all the world and all of reality seemed, to some, a mere projection of accidental organization amid a sea of unrelenting chaos. Ehrenfest’s part in The Maniac is to introduce this terror: the dawn of a new century of human understanding, far out past where man had observed before.

This sort of vision haunted Ehrenfest. The political climate of Germany hounded what was already a mind disturbed by these revelations. Labatut depicts Ehrenfest driven mad by the vision, trapping a bewildered Dirac during a conference and confessing his neurosis. He envisioned

a strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science, which Paul could almost see as an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit hovering over his colleagues’ heads at meetings and conferences, peering over their shoulders, or nudging their elbows, ever so slightly, as they wrote down their equations, a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gathering strength, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control.²

Ehrenfest’s prologue is not the place for the exact nature of this unfolding to be made clearer to the reader. It is enough, however, to display his neurosis as something that is as projected against the world as it is a symptom of it; Ehrenfest may well have been driven mad, but the information exterior to him, the patterns he was seeing in the directions of theoretical physics and mathematics: there were serious problems gnawing at what merely a decade earlier had seemed to be nearly coherent fields of knowledge.

With Ehrenfest’s decline in mind, the scenery changes. He boards a train bound for Amsterdam and for him, damnation, his a gun and conscience both primed, whether by interior psychosis or the determination of exterior demons, to commit the deeds that would end his life. And with a cinematic flair, Labatut uses the turning of pages to transition the narrative to the main personality in the book: Jewish-Hungarian mathematician, logician, nuclear physicist, computer scientist, and arguable madman, John von Neumann.

The Limits of Reason

It is with the beginning of the second section that The Maniac presents itself as a truly experimental work. Labatut presents the life of John von Neumann in the form of testimonials from colleagues, acquaintances, family and, insofar as he had any, close friends. Although each testimonial carries an appropriate tinge of each character’s unique tone, Labatut’s style remains fairly uniform throughout; the complexity of his sentences at times makes these testimonials difficult exactly to pin down as either interviews, one-sided conversations, public monologues or, perhaps, an organized presentation of various private streams of consciousness. This section of the book, which is by far most of its substance, is as much a character study of each of these individuals as it is of the object of attention.

This format allows Labatut to explore the broader elements of Neumann’s research both conceptually and with respect to their historical antecedents. As will be touched on later, the book is obviously not a biography or monograph of Neumann’s life or work; rather, Labatut uses Neumann’s life, as well as that of Ehrenfest and later, Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, to present a vision that is greater than the sum of the lives that put it together.

The second segment of the novel is itself divided into three parts, each of which was concerned with Neumann’s work but none of which explicitly features Neumann as a character. The first part treats with his youth up through his schooling, university years and immigration to the United States from Hungary. Part two primarily concerns his life and ideas surrounding the period of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath, while part three deals directly with Neumann’s revolutionary designs and development of the book’s namesake: the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, a designation almost certainly conceived around the excuse to get its acronym.

The recurring thread across all three parts is, of course, an extension of the thread introduced with Ehrenfest’s intellectual pursuits: the underlying darkness beneath formal logic and mathematics that prohibits perfectly coherent rational systems. This comes closest to the surface in a segment narrated by Eugene Wigner, close friend and later fellow physicist who had first met Neumann in the equivalent of junior high school. Using Wigner, Labatut describes Neumann’s near obsession with mathematics all throughout university, his attention drawn particularly to David Hilbert’s effort to rectify the inconsistencies and paradoxes at the foundation of mathematics. Known as Hilbert’s program, the first quarter of twentieth century academic mathematics focused intensely on this issue until, finally, the young Kurt Gӧdel proved the task was impossible. But Gӧdel was not without his eccentricities; as he aged, he grew more paranoid and his behavior worsened; Labatut draws a correlation between the mysterious reality he discovered about mathematics and his gradual lurch toward insanity:

If it was the nature of his work that made him unstable, or if you actually had to be unstable to think in the way that Gӧdel did. I believe there is truth in both views. The few times I spoke to him, I could sense how logic and logical thinking were inextricably bound to his mounting derangement, because in some sense, paranoia is logic run amok. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” wrote Gӧdel; he was of the firm belief that there was a reason for everything. If you think that way, it’s a small step to begin to see hidden machinations and agents operating to manipulate the most common, everyday occurrences. But it was not just a psychological imbalance that undid him, he was also affected by the ideas that he brought into the world, ideas from which we have yet to recover. Truths that cannot be proven, contradictions that cannot be avoided—these self-referential nightmares of logic preyed on him as powerful demons that, once called down upon us, could never be truly banished, demons that also gnawed away at my dear friend Janos.³

For the religious, such sentiments express the hole in creation left by the Fall: a sense of brokenness fundamental to reality that eludes direct observation. Only its effects can be felt in the form of incompleteness, incoherence, madness, suffering and pain, all things that bring about more of themselves the more one bends toward them, pulling in the attention of a soul that, if left unchecked, drag him ever further into that hole. For the irreligious, however, that hole eventually comes to define the totality of their living experience. There is no alternative, no other point of reference that does not itself tumble into that hole, and falling deeper into its depths makes their vision of a sensible reality slip farther and farther away from them. Consider Ehrenfest of the first chapter, and here, too, Gӧdel.

Neumann’s experience was by all outwards appearances, however, different from those of his more depressive colleagues and acquaintances. Upon the publication of Gӧdel’s proofs, Neumann dropped all obvious interest in Hilbert’s program, shifted his attention totally to physics, and continued on about his life as usual.

This led him, famously, to the Los Alamos laboratory and the Manhattan Project. While Neumann was not directly responsible for the development of the atomic bomb, he was intimately involved in its creation and, more importantly, where many of the scientists involved in the project resigned afterward, Neumann remained amiably contracted with the government and avidly worked on the development of thermonuclear weaponry—hydrogen bombs that easily yielded blast potentials that were orders of magnitude larger than what first turned the American southwest to glass in 1945.

By the time the Cold War had escalated into a total thermonuclear cold stalemate, the US Government looked again to Neumann for a geopolitical stratagem in order to avoid mutually-assured destruction. The result was game theory, formulated by working closely with Oskar Morgenstern. Labatut depicts Morgenstern as in both awe and shock of what sort of intellect Neumann had:

[Johnny] was profoundly pessimistic, his vision of human beings was grim and cynical, and so his mind may have unwittingly tainted the equations that upheld our thinking with its own dark tinge. […] I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game.⁴

He also includes the comment that the “only man [he’d] ever met like that was Johnny von Neumann.” But this should cause the reader to pause, especially at that point in the narrative. By this point, the reader has already been introduced not just to Neumann’s personal eccentricities, but the flaws apparent in his character.

Labatut mentions how his second wife Klari, with whom he tumultuously spent the rest of his life, described Neumann as “morbidly lustful” who “was perhaps the most disgusting in his relationship with women.”⁵ Likewise, depicting a later period in Neumann’s life, Labatut uses Wigner to remark on how Neumann’s cancer had facilitated a certain death-drive, “drinking heavily and cramming down more food than he had ever done,” growing “bloated and obese.”⁶ While the mania of Ehrenfest prompted a decline into suicidal ideation, and the mania of Gӧdel drove him into the definition of neuroticism, Neumann’s mania had comparatively normal outlets: unrestricted indulgence of the passions. Labatut, using Morgenstern as a voice for it, appropriately characterizes the modern mind’s total blindness to any connection between madness or personal instability with overindulgence of lust or gluttony.

This contrast seems only fitting to highlight after Labatut has passed through Neumann’s contributions to nuclear weaponry and game theory, as it indicates a growing dissatisfaction in these characters—and somewhat by analogy, of all the world—in explanations for intelligence and existence. The book begins shifting toward its final direction at this point, introducing the minor but nonetheless important figure of Nils Aall Barricelli, a largely forgotten figure in computer history whose possible legacy was rehabilitated with George Dyson’s book Turing’s Cathedral. Labatut introduces Barricelli first through engineer Julian Bigelow, who worked on MANIAC at the Institute for Advanced Study:

He believed in symbiogenesis.

A highly controversial theory opposed to Darwinism.

Explains the complexity of living organisms through symbolic associations not natural selection and inheritance.

A fusion of simpler forms.

He seeded the memory of the MANIAC with random numbers. Introduced rules to govern their behavior. That’s how he made them “evolve.”

Hypothesis was that they would begin to show characteristics of genes.⁷

Barricelli, who gets his own chapter a few pages later, extended his extremely broad definition of life to that of strings of digits determined by machine code that, at the time, was written on punch cards for MANIAC to decipher and implement. Labatut uses Barricelli to express, for the first time in so many explicit words, the modern Promethean impulse of the twentieth century’s leading minds: “that new deity, the one we now worship before with bowed heads and look down upon with glazed eyes; that pythoness was a computer.”⁸ Barricelli’s interest lay in proving that the definition of life was not bound by flesh and blood but could be extended to his “symbio-organisms” which operated inside the digital universe of the MANIAC; this interest naturally propelled him to attribute to computers a sort of apotheosis—one that Neumann would, in his own way, share or mimic as his interest in the possibilities of computation expanded.

At the end of his life, Neumann was confined to a government military hospital bed as mid-century medicine attempted to treat his terminal cancer. Top military brass and government officials remained regular visitors as they consulted him on matters ranging from national security to weapon and computational research and development. Meanwhile, as Labatut notes, his room grew increasingly precarious in its haphazard collection of machines, toys, and objects made for mental amusement. It’s not hard to see this as an outward mirror of his interior world, a space the narrative never explicitly comes even close to contact with.

The madness Labatut deals with so regularly in The Maniac, that which seemed to have taken the lives of so many other bright mathematicians and which seemed instead to have enlivened Neumann, was not something to be outrun any more than was death. As his physical state declined, Labatut uses a recollection of Eugene Wigner to begin drawing the curtains on Neumann’s life. He was a man at that point in unceasing pain, losing his voice, and readily losing his mind as cancer treatments and declining health made thinking an increasingly difficult chore. As such, his pessimism grew too large to contain.

Jansci thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology; our ever-expanding technical knowledge was the only thing that separated us from our forefathers, since in morals, philosophy, and general thought, we were no better (indeed, we were much, much worse) than the Greeks, the Vedic people, or the small nomadic tribes that still clung to nature as the sole granter of grace and the true measure of existence.⁹

Like Barricelli, he saw the opportunity for technology to fill the God-shaped gap left carved into his heart that until then he had found distractions from. At the time of his death, however, despite his work in computational engineering creating the framework and architecture that would define computer systems for decades to come, the total amount of computational power in the world measured at about half a megabyte. To consider Neumann prescient with regard to the computer would be an understatement. And Labatut reveals the end of his life to be as mysterious as the interior workings of his mind.

Imitation of Reason

The final part of The Maniac takes place principally in Seoul, Korea, and its primary figures are Lee Sedol, the world-renown master of Go, and the computer program AlphaGo. Rather than an epilogue, the last section, entitled ‘The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence,’ serves as the capstone to the structure of questions, ruminations and narrative that Labatut thus far constructed. This section of the novel is considerably shorter than the loose biography of Neumann, but unlike the segment on Ehrenfest, which was about the length of a novelette or long short story, this clocks in at roughly the length of a novella.

To set the stage, Labatut describes the mythological history of Go, its origins in China, and its embrace as the premier strategy game across the entire East Asian world. He traces the biography of Lee Sedol, his upbringing, his confidence and arrogance, and his general strategic approach to the game. He traces also a brief background of Demis Hassabis, the company he co-founded named DeepMind, and his interest in machine learning algorithms, large language models, and so-called artificial intelligence. For some background on the significance of the game played between Sedol and DeepMind’s eventual product AlphaGo, Labatut also supplies some important but relatively well-known background on the histories of computers facing off against real people—the most famous example being chess champion Garry Kasparov’s 1997 loss to IBM’s Deep Blue.

This background is important in considering the purpose of the section. Go, as Labatut makes clear, is not a game at all similar to chess, despite both making use of a square grid. In chess, players control pieces and work at removing those pieces from the board, until at last one specific piece—the king—is both challenged and rendered unable to move. Some pieces are more valuable than others, and writing an algorithm that weights pieces and judges movements based on protecting, sacrificing, and capturing pieces based on these weights is not, in this day and age, a particularly sophisticated ordeal. Nor, given the method by which Deep Blue operated in 1997, is using raw computational power to project movement (or ‘decision’) trees out in response to every move played by a human player.

Go, however, is nearly opposite to this in almost every conceivable way:

While you can easily program a chess-playing computer to distinguish what the intrinsic value of the queen is in relation to a knight, a bishop, or a pawn, in Go the weight of each stone has to do with its position on the board, and its relationship with every other stone, as well as with the intervening spaces on the grid. Telling a good move from a bad one is highly subjective; professionals feel out positions, they use their intuition and instinct to decide where to place the next stone.¹⁰

As Labatut explains here, one cannot simply use a program, such as Deep Blue, to brute force a win out of a game of Go against a master using computational power alone. There are orders of magnitude more variables in play than the movement of bishops or pawns, and there is no easy, calculatory means by which an algorithm can readily prioritize pieces, positions, or even developments on the board. For these reasons, Go was for decades considered to be a living tradition that stood as proof of artificial intelligence’s limited capacity; neither any programmer nor systems engineer could crack how to make a program replicate, simulate, or otherwise play the kind of strategies that could best even a moderately competent Go enthusiast, much less a master.

In 2016, however, Lee Sedol, prodigy of Go from his early childhood, one of the youngest men in history to reach Ninth-Dan ‘grandmaster’ rank, squared off against DeepMind’s AlphaGo in a traditional five-game tournament styled match, and he lost four matches out of five. Two instances of their match are of particular note.

The first is move 37 of game 2. AlphaGo beat Lee in the first game, humbling the man rather quickly after a lengthy but intense match. In the second game, however, Lee adjusted his strategy and, early on, seemed poised to enter the midgame with a firm upper hand. Instead, as he left for a smoke break, AlphaGo played “one of the most uncanny moves played by anyone in centuries,”¹¹ which observer Fan Hui, the European Go champion who had been squarely beaten by AlphaGo already, later recalled as “not a human move.”¹² This move confounded Lee, apparently, and was the one move that he believed was AlphaGo’s secret plan; the whole situation on the board reversed in an instant, and this was proven over the course of the rest of the game as Lee gradually but definitively lost. Quoting Lee’s interview after the match, Labatut writes:

“I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move it changed my mind. Surely AlphaGo is creative. This move made me think about Go in a new light. What does creativity mean in Go? It was not just a good, or great, or powerful move. It was meaningful.”¹³

AlphaGo won this and the following match, bringing the score three-nothing out of five. Lee could have conceded the tournament here, but he continued on despite no chance of victory over the whole tournament. And it’s good that he did, because match four brings about what Labatut dramatizes as probably the second most noteworthy instance between the players: match 4’s move 78.

By match four, Lee was deeply perturbed. His moves were uncharacteristically slow and his game unnaturally cautious, having been effectively humiliated by the machine not just once but three consecutive times. Then, after spending nearly all that was left of his allotted time considering a single move, Sedol played a cutting stone that commentators said no other human would think to have made. This play reversed the course of the match and caused AlphaGo to begin spiraling, playing legitimately bad moves and seemingly throwing the game:

It was not the first time that they had witnessed this type of behavior. Every now and then, in very specific board configurations, AlphaGo went mad, suddenly losing all sense of position and value, to the point where it would think that it was alive in areas in which it was very clearly dead, as if it had become blind, unable to distinguish self from other, black from white, friend from foe, life from death. They watched as Aja Huang tried not to betray his feelings before the cameras, although they knew that he understood just how far AlphaGo had fallen, and how deranged its systems had become: “I knew after move 78, after like ten or twenty moves, that AlphaGo somehow became crazy, but I didn’t realize why,” he would later recall.¹⁴

This sealed the fourth game in Sedol’s favor, but it was the only match that he would win. AlphaGo spiraled for the remaining hundred-some moves before conceding. The last match resulted in another win for it, leaving Sedol’s seventy-eighth move immortalized as if a last gasp of brilliance against a future seemingly composed of complex probability matrices and processing units.

After this, AlphaGo would go on to make more wins against Go grandmasters. Its knowledge base, to speak colloquially, increased as it played many countless hours of games in the span of minutes as DeepMind continued to work on it. Later, as an experiment, they gutted its knowledge of rules, pulled all the data of the previous games it had crawled (every recorded game of Go in history, in addition to the many millions that had been played online), leaving it with no knowledge of Go whatsoever. The team of DeepMind continued pressing it to play, however, forcing the algorithm to ‘learn’ the rules by trial and error and, effectively, create its own approach and strategy to the game. The result was a machine that, once released onto the internet and rebranded dominated players as AlphaZero. Within less than two years of AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol, this revamped model dominated not just Go, but Shogi and Chess as well. It is, in effect, unbeatable by human players.

The Shape of Reason

The Maniac, if summarized as succinctly as possible, tracks the development of the motives behind the creation of artificial general intelligence, a goal that as yet remains unfulfilled and, depending on how strictly one defines it, will forever remain so. Although the general public shares some vague interest in AI, only recently has it become a reality for common existence past the fantasies of action films and futuristic crime dramas. The advances in computational power and algorithmic complexity have made machines that even the average man finds impossible to totally ignore, being that they’re sophisticated enough now for employers to believe that they can supplant certain kinds of jobs.

Labatut does not track, however, the development of AI itself. For the purposes of The Maniac, the story lays behind the motive for its search. Why were a certain subset of highly intelligent people interested in creating machines that imitated life? Why were they so willing to, to put it bluntly, reduce human existence to some observable set of physical states that can be imitated by vacuum tubes, transistors, and now microprocessors? It was not simply out of a drive to reproduce; many of these intellectuals had children, even if they weren’t exactly the best of parents.

It was something far different. Labatut’s depiction of Neumann presents a community of highly intelligent people who had exhausted themselves with atheism’s most fundamental question of existence: why is there something rather than nothing? And more relevantly, why is there something capable of recognizing this mystery in the first place? It’s not just a question of why order exists in a universe so apparently founded on chaos; it’s about why there exists a being with the agency and reason capable of discerning it. And, being highly intelligent men of, at best, extremely soft religious convictions—if they had them at all—they turned to the cutting edges of science in order to attempt to find answers: physics and mathematics.

That these were dead ends was not immediately obvious to many of them. Ehrenfest’s madness stemmed from exactly such a difficulty in reconciling the contradiction, exacerbated by the phantom of unreason he saw growing thanks to the discoveries like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Gӧdel, too, seemed driven mad by the same inability to navigate that mystery.

On the other hand, Neumann, it seemed, did not let the mystery paralyze him. Instead, he sought to systematize the gargantuan task of modeling the mystery: building an analogue to all of existence in order to study it. This started with his work formulating the architecture of the modern computer and directly led to the development of artificial intelligence. One might argue that Labatut depicts Neumann as starting down the path because he was bored or eccentric, or because he was just a little mentally unstable and prone to the whisperings of whatever muse had taken an interest in him, but these explanations ring too artificially. The mania resultant from trying to hold two apparently contradictory facts as truth at once—that the presence of order in the universe is self-evident, and yet knowledge itself seems unable to coherently document or systematize it for total comprehension—did eventually come to deeply affect him in the end. It was perhaps, however, the fear of death that spurred this mania’s advance.

Labatut chooses the example of AlphaGo to end the book because of this focus on mania. The mechanical and man-made deity that Neumann, following Barricelli, had conceived was not itself immune to losing itself in madness. Worse, no one could understand why. The ultimate problem, the central theme of the book, was not solved by artificial intelligence. And what’s left unsaid is the consideration of what artificial intelligence actually is or, stated more appropriately, what it isn’t: life.

Barricelli of course disagreed, though the very act of assigning the term to digital numbers is a contradiction in terms. Most colloquially, life is “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter.”¹⁵ As human beings, we live for as long as fail to die; for as long as our hearts beat and our lungs draw breath, we fulfill the definition of living. Poets and artists might demand that the mere automation of physical processes isn’t enough to qualify a human being as living—at least not enough to distinguish him from the life exemplified by amoeba or insects. Somehow, the proper functioning of a vessel to pump blood is not enough to encapsulate the mania and passion of emotion, the sublime experience of beauty, or the vivid narrative provided by functioning memory.

Here a sympathizer of Barricelli’s view may insist that, due to advances in technology, the definition of life should be given a refit. The Maniac does not really argue for this, though it does not exactly argue in either direction so much as present a narrative where these ideas are impossible not to entertain. But were one to argue for this, the conclusion to reach is that artificial intelligence, capable of reasoning faster and with more perfect memory, cannot escape the very same madness that seemed to condemn some of the brightest minds of twentieth century.

Were one to argue the opposite, however, that life’s definition remains exactly what is intuitively grasped by everyone who has ever lived, then the conclusion of the book presents artificial intelligence as something slightly more sinister. It presents another outlet for this madness, and yet, rather than being treated as a mirror or another mechanical presentation of it, it is steadily treated as an answer to it—as if AI might have some will capable of understanding the madness. One may even consider it as the pool of water that Narcissus lost himself to, but rather than driven mad by the beauty of the reflection staring back, this modern Narcissus is driven mad by the madness reflected back at him, and in turn drives further into madness by accusing the pool of doing this to him on purpose.

A faithful Catholic may be tempted to dismiss the secular claims repeated throughout the book about peering into the void. So too do several characters attempt to trivialize God and the innate meaning to be found knit into the world since its creation. The characters who profess these views, however, are particle physicists, nuclear engineers, unreligious Jews and atheists, fallen-away Protestants, converso Catholics. They are men whose intellects are dominated either by abstract mathematics or the physical actions of neutrons. They’re women who subjected themselves to the madness of men who had dismissed out of hand any moral frameworks that could temper the passions of their gluttony or concupiscence. They’re the secular geniuses who felt—not really perceived—that the world had not gone mad, but was already mad, had perhaps been made mad, and all indications of substance at the foundations of knowledge and reality were just shadows flickering against the wall of Plato’s cave.

Labatut could, conceivably, have included a testimony by a man of faith, but given the scope of his project and the times in which it was considered, one wonders who he might have come up with. The priest who visited Neumann on his deathbed, perhaps. One of the members of Los Alamos who dared carry the faith. These ask questions outside the context of the book, however, but it does seem a little weaker without them being asked.

For this reason, it does seem that The Maniac stresses the mania without an interest in finding a resolution to it, as all pursuits of a resolution in the secularized fields of engineering, theory and pure math lead instead to a further settlement of that mania into deeper recesses of man’s soul. That seems only to be intentional.

Conclusion

Based on the content of the book, its summary, and to some extent, this review, one might field the question, why didn’t Labatut write a work of nonfiction? The characters of The Maniac were and are all real people. They are not based on real figures; he uses their real names and describes the real events that happened to them. What is fictionalized is only the fact that he rarely quotes directly from particular letters, speeches, interviews or diaries of these people, presenting instead stylized monologues that segue seamlessly into narrative prose. The testimonies of Neumann’s acquaintances, for instance, come across at once as the words given to an unseen interviewer almost as much as they do, at other times, as conversational remarks given only to another in great confidence.

What The Maniac displays is a great adeptness at distinguishing the differences between fiction and nonfiction, and in particular, that fiction’s opposite is not ‘fact’ per se, any more than non-fiction’s opposite is ‘lie’. Non-fiction is not always factual, as words written in such a mode can be in error or, as is the case with so much media today, literally true but structurally or socially some form of deception. A short perusal of journalism is enough to satisfy this point.

The opposite phenomenon can be explored with fiction, however, wherein fiction can depict true events and real people, and reflect upon its audience true facts about the world in order to present a particular set of beliefs, but all within a stylized and aesthetical mode that in no way resembles the nonfiction genres of monograph, biography or history. This is exactly what Labatut has accomplished with The Maniac; the book is not a work of historical fiction, nor the dramatization of real events. It would not be appropriate to compare it to Nolan’s recent Oppenheimer, for instance. This is something else altogether.

It is hard not to draw a parallel between this and The Passenger/Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy’s last novel, which had been published the year previous to this one. Both deal specifically with the history of theoretical physics across the twentieth century, both deal to some extent with the relationship between mathematics and human reason, and both also explicitly discuss how the development of nuclear weaponry altered man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos. The Maniac succeeds, however, where The Passenger failed; McCarthy’s story is altogether different, presenting some almost-lucid combination of a life story, patchwork memoir and crime thriller. McCarthy considered and conceived of a story about a brother and a sister in which the content of mathematics and physics played some substantial but not totally integral role.

Labatut, however, chose the stories of Ehrenfest, Neumann, and Lee Sedol because the novel he conceived of was, at its most fundamental level, about the line between reason and insanity that man’s will rests on. Even though there is not a single equation in the entire book, nor any lengthy discourse on specific theorems or explications of proofs, mathematics is indeed integral to the book. The means by which man formulates knowledge and the building blocks that knowledge is built up by: math is one of those blocks. And that mania discussed above is the phantom glimpsed in the depths of the fear that math, like so many other of these blocks, is not sufficient.

The Maniac begins with a suicidal physicist at the edge of computation. It continues through the life-told-in-parallax of the father of computer engineering and the forerunner of artificial intelligence, and up into the next century, the greatest public display of technological computation against mankind yet witnessed at the book’s publication. It is part short story and part drama, part series of stylized testimonies; it reads closer to the parts kit of an unassembled model than it does to a conventional narrative. It is fiction and yet it depicts real events. Its subject is reason and yet it is entitled The Maniac.

111.

222-23.

3100-101.

4144.

5132.

6223.

7180-181.

8197.

9222.

10300.

11319.

12318.

13320.

14335.

15Oxford English Dictionary

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