We have reached the highest point of civilisation. All that is left for us is to decay and fall

I loved this book and some of the prose, particularly the chapters on Heisenberg and Schrödinger, were electrifying to read. The synthesis of fiction, non-fiction, and discursive essay pushes the boundaries of form and, to me, bore the clear stamp of literary influences including Bolaño, Sebald, and above all Borges. It's very rare to read recently published work which isn't stale or uninspired, but is a genuine work of ideas and this book fits the bill.

The essence of this book is that scientists are the prophets of modernity. It's about the very nature of scientific inspiration. About how scientific ideas and concepts have as potent a capacity to disrupt and fracture our very view of the nature of reality in much the same way religious or ideological ones do. It's also a book about human folly, about Promethean impulses, about how the relentless, unerring attempts of geniuses to make sense of the infinite complexity of the world around them has unleashed destructive forces that are impossible for our impotent minds to comprehend or control. Labatut shows us that these eccentric geniuses caught a glimpse of the darkness which lurks somewhere within the scientific project. Perhaps this is the "heart of the heart" which terrified Alexander Grothendieck, or the fundamentally unknowable which bemused and scared Karl Schwarzschild. These men pushed to the very edge of what our minds can understand and perhaps in doing so realised there are things we ought not to.

If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will - millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space - unleash something comparable to the singularity?

What strikes me about this book in contrast to some of the reviews I read after finishing it is that science must be understood as a fundamentally human endeavour and I think this is the primary thing Labatut is gesturing towards. Scientific discovery and the will to discover are inextricably intertwined with personal and social crisis. Mythologised or not, there is something very Nietzschean about the story of scientific discovery, about geniuses driven to revolutionise how we understand the world around us and in doing so upend entire systems of thought and belief. Science and power, technology and power, cannot be disentangled because the desire to transcend, to overcome our natural limitations, is intrinsic to the human condition. This is why the form of this book, the liminal, ambiguous synthesis of non-fiction and fiction, is so apt. I don't think this book is about science per se so much as it is about the impulses that underpin our unflagging quest, for good or for ill, to push onwards towards something perceived as greater. The great irony of course is that this onwards march may well catalyse our own destruction. We all live in a world we now scarcely understand, but it is one we unleashed on ourselves. A book like this is a dire warning about sleepwalking into technological armageddon. Perhaps we're already past that point, I don't know, but Labatut is attuned to the deeply human dimension of technological and scientific change and this is a brilliant artistic counterpoint to the plethora of deterministic narratives about technology which prevail across creative forms.

Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

I'm very keen to read more Labatut after this, particularly The MANIAC. He genuinely strikes me as one of the few current voices in literature publishing excellent stuff.