Benjamín Labatut's novel centers on the Hungarian American polymath John von Neumann, one of the most brilliant and unsettling minds of the twentieth century, and uses his life to trace the promise and terror of modern science. Labatut, who won a wide readership with When We Cease to Understand the World, again blends documented fact with imaginative reconstruction. Here he builds a literary triptych: it opens with the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, a friend of Einstein who fell into despair—and violence—as he watched science and technology become tyrannical forces; it centers on von Neumann, the prodigy who transformed nearly every field he touched, inventing game theory, helping design the atomic bomb, pioneering the modern computer, and laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence, digital life, and self-reproducing machines; and it closes a century later with the 2016 confrontation between the South Korean Go master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo. Von Neumann's story is told polyphonically, through the voices of the family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals who knew him, a chorus that conveys both his dazzling gifts and the fear he inspired in those around him. Through these interlocking narratives Labatut confronts the central question von Neumann never lived to resolve: whether humanity can create an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control, and what it means to unleash such forces on the world. Moving in its blend of beauty and dread, and hovering deliberately between biography and fiction, The MANIAC is a meditation on genius, on the demonic momentum of scientific discovery, and on the dawning age of machine intelligence.