Tom McCarthy today on a new novel about von Neumann at Los Alamos:
|
"Beyond its mid-20th-century viewfinder, though, it quickly becomes clear that what The Maniac is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection." "Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac , women function as bit players. At Los Alamos they’re even called 'computers,' since they carry out the secondary, workaday calculations that are then fed upward for male geniuses to work their magic on. But does von Neumann really deserve the title 'Father of Computers,' granted him here by his first wife, Mariette Kovesi? Doesn’t Ada Lovelace have a prior claim as their mother?" |
