The MANIAC by Benjamín LabatutMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole, much like the hollow that the Spirit left when it abandoned this accursed world... These god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as that which was lost. The choice of that something - if indeed it is a choice at all - rules the destiny of men."
Labatut reminds me a bit of Richard Powers, in that they're both capable of writing books that serve as place markers in humanity's story. And if perhaps Labatut's writing does not seem as finely polished, the phrases not as perfect, perhaps it is only to be expected as the Chilean author wrote his second novel in English (unlike his first).
Labatut especially excels in showing the twin terrors wrought by technology: fearsomely fast progress, yes, but the author asks: at what cost?
This would make for a fitting companion read with the Oppenheimer biography AMERICAN PROMETHEUS.
The title may suggest incredibly intelligent supermen who step off the edge of the razor-thin line separating genius and madness, and while the book does do that, it also speaks of a very old but very important computer. The MANIAC (acronym for the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was smaller than its predecessor, the ENIAC, and made the hydrogen bomb possible.
The bomb that was five hundred times more powerful than the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those bombs that followed a scientist's rational, inhumane logic when he calculated that they had better be blown up before hitting the ground, for maximum damage inflicted onto innocent civilians whose only crime was being born Japanese.
That mad scientist was John von Neumann, whose story takes most of the pages of the book.
Perhaps the most affecting portion is the last one, which focuses on the game go, and how in 2016, a computer beat the best human player in four out of five games (AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol).
The part where Labatut analyzes the one win, and not the four losses, makes his readers hope in a future where ChatGPT and AI has not yet totally subsumed our world.
We read Labatut to have the threads of events past and present woven in a pattern all can read, and just barely, he affords us a glimpse into the future we're so recklessly diving towards.
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