Benjamin Labatut, the International Booker shortlisted author of When We Cease to Understand the World, brings us his dazzling, kaleidoscopic new novel about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI. John 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.
New Hardback Fiction - Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, Edinburgh, Ely, and St Andrews
Benjamín Labatut – New York Review Books
New Hardback Fiction - Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, Edinburgh, Ely, and St Andrews
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, Edinburgh, Ely, and St Andrews
Spotlight On The Maniac By Benjamín Labatut
With The MANIAC, author Benjamin Labatut dives into the path of madness - The Globe and Mail
With The MANIAC, author Benjamin Labatut dives into the path of madness - The Globe and Mail
The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut review – genius and madness in the shadow of the atomic bomb, Fiction
Benjamín Labatut – New York Review Books
Spotlight On The Maniac By Benjamín Labatut
Nuclear bombs, artificial intelligence and the madness of reason – in The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut examines the troubling dawn of the digital age
The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut: a miracle of a novel
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