This is the same Benjamin Labatut who wrote the utterly amazing “When We Cease To Understand The World” a couple years ago. And now I just lucked into this second book.  https://mybecky.blog/2022/06/19/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut

The Maniac 
by Benjamin Labatut 
September, 2023 – 368 pp 
Read by Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar, 8h 51m
Rating – 9.5 / 21st Century fiction 
(both read and listened)

It’s a strange one in many ways, but for me it got almost personal. So yesterday, I was skimming some reviews (see what other people thought) and one of them had what looked to be an unrelated, but interesting video link in it. I clicked and then proceeded to watch a 90-minute prize-winning documentary. This is a seriously odd thing for me to do, folks. – I don’t even watch many movies, but I do enjoy a good documentary. This one is called “AlphaGo.”  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

The strange thing about reading the book is that it covers exactly the same material as the documentary, but reading the book I got further inside the competition than I did via the movie. There was more detail even if that part was only about 25% of the book. The book was much more than the computer challenging a pro to a game of Go. I just didn’t notice the connection when I clicked to watch because I hadn’t gotten to that part in the book yet.  LOL!   I had no clue.  

Anyway, in some thematic ways The Maniac is similar to Labatut’s first book, “When We Cease To Understand The World” First, it seems like a dark and crazy-ass book, but it’s a fictionalization of the life of John von Neumann who was a brilliant physicist, mathematician, early computer developer, and much more.

Just as Hitler was in his ascendency, Neumann and his wife, both Jewish, immigrated from Hungary to the US where they had a child and later divorced. He was recruited for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and worked on it alongside other physicists and mathematicians. Many of whom won Nobel Prizes later and their friendships continued after the war with work on computers and AI beckoning.  

These fictionalized memories give first person perspectives for the first 3/4 of the book. Included are Neumann’s family members. his mother, a brother, 2 wives and a daughter, as well as other scientists. Eugene Wigner, George Polya, Theodore Von Karman,  Gabor Szego, Richard Feynman, Sydney Brenner, Nils Hall Barricelli, Vincent Ford. Some have one brief memory, others have two or three. The memories are basically in chronological order. There are more people mentioned than those who “write little memories.”  

There are the physicists and mathematicians of WWII who also had to come to grips with the theories of Nils Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein and other brilliant scientists. Not all fared so well with their understanding of how the world works because the old ways evaporated when they were extended to the sub-atomic level – or should I say realm.  They had thought the math was solid and unquestionable, but its solidity started to wobble and the firm foundations were no longer universally agreed to. 

 Epigraph: 
“She approached me dreadfully fast and put her foot on my neck, and cried out in a terrible voice; ‘Do you know who I am?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Long have you caused me pain and woe. You are my soul’s faculty of reason.’” 
Hadewijch of Brabant, Thirteenth-Century Poet and Mystic  

The title, The MANIAC, refers to MANIAC I, the acronym of Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I which was developed in 1952  using architecture from John von Neumann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I  .That was used until 1958 after which Model II was developed and used until 1965 by which time Model III was in operation between 1957 and 1964.    

*****
 An interview with Benjamin Labatut, NPR – 
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/07/1204450958/benjamin-labatuts-novel-the-maniac-follows-an-ai-scientist-troubled-by-his-work

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/von-neumann-the-smartest-person-of-the-20th-century/

The narration is beautifully performed by Gergo Danka and Eva Magyar, although to my ears there was a little too much accent.