From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World : a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI

'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark Haddon

John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - thought he might represent the next step in human evolution.

After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master, Lee Sedol, and the AI program AlphaGo.

Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.

Sometimes discovery brings destruction

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled lives we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

Ne zaman dünyayı anlamayı bıraktık? Hiroşima ve Nagasaki’yi yerle bir eden atomları bir generalin yağlı parmakları değil, elinde bir avuç denklem olan bir grup fizikçi parçalamıştı. İnsanlığın sonunu insanlığı kurtarmayı amaçlayan fikirler mi getirecek? Şilili yazar Benjamín Labatut Arsız Yeşillik’i meydana getiren metinlerde dünyanın gidişatını değiştirirken insanlığı uçurumun kıyısına getiren bilimcilerin beklenmedik esin kaynaklarına, uçsuz bucaksız saplantılarına, deha ve deliliklerine büyüteç tutuyor. 2021 Uluslararası Booker Ödülü ve Amerikan Ulusal Kitap Ödülü finalisti Arsız Yeşillik bilimin hem kişisel hem de kitlesel ölçekteki yaratıcılık ve yıkıcılığına dair benzersiz bir anlatı. “Yıllardır okuduğum en tuhaf ve özgün kitap.”Philip Pullman “Labatut gelecekte değil günümüzde geçen distopik bir kurmaca dışı roman yazmış.”John Banville