The Maniac is the story of the great inscrutable intelligences of our modern era. It traces a long and sordid path from the frenzied genius of our most revolutionary mathematicians and scientists to the cold, calculating procedures of artificial intelligence; one defining the century just passed, the other looming over the century to come. Linking the two is Benjamín Labatut’s central subject, Johnny Von Neumann – a true, undisputed genius, an unrestrained polymath whose work consists of hundreds of discoveries and whose greatest legacies are nuclear Armageddon and artificial life.

Similar to Labatut’s previous work When We Cease to Understand the World, The Maniac exists within a nebulous space between fiction and nonfiction, exclusively concerned with true events, but delving far deeper into his subjects’ minds than even a biographer could. Like magic, monumental historical figures such as Johnny Von Neumann are brought to life, their entrancing internal psychology grounded in moments of direct quotation. However, with The Maniac, Labatut steps even further into subjectivity – excepting a contextualising prologue and epilogue, each chapter is told as if directly from the voice of some key figure from Von Neumann’s life, both personal and professional. What results is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a man whose mind defied understanding, but around whom the scientific world revolved.

Spanning all five decades of Von Neumann’s staggeringly eventful life, Labatut links together each moment, each discovery to interrogate Von Neumann and his insatiable hunger for understanding and progress regardless of the moral consequences. His genius in computing helped produce our most devastating weapons, his excessive rationality led us to the apocalyptic doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and his search for an intelligence to succeed his own paved the way for the digital minds that now threaten to surpass the human. Von Neumann himself may have been human, but Labatut suggests he was also something more, an intellectual hurricane whose brilliantly destructive impact is still felt today.