Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick
Penguin, 2008

So, you’ve heard about chaos magic and chaos theory – and more amazingly, Robbie Williams and Jurassic Park still haven’t scared you off. Fascinated and perplexed, you now want to know what chaos really involves, in theory and practice. Michael Crichton provides tantalisingly little. Michael Moorcock kicks ass but the extradimensional setting strikes you as only marginally more realistic than marauding dinosaurs. You come across fractals on the Internet and conclude that they really do look quite nice as Windows wallpaper.

By now, you must feel very frustrated. Ostensibly to put an end to your suffering personally, James Gleick – former scientific journalist with the New York Times and author of Isaac Newton – unleashed in the final decades of the twentieth century a most insidious and profane tome known only to mortals as Chaos.

Verily, this singular and perfidious text may seem to rescue you from your tormenting curiosity for a time. However, delighting in fiery and visceral images derived from “fractional dimensions” and a creeping universality extracted from the most disgustingly intimate reaches of space and time, Chaos will only ensnare you all the deeper in the squamous study of applied mathematics.
More to the point, allow me to make this very clear, so that even the most witless may consider themselves duly warned – if you read this book, you will learn about the infamous Butterfly Effect, strange attractors, emergent order, information theory, and the human history of a true scientific revolution that has taken place in our lifetime.

On a more sinister note, Gleick’s Chaos makes no mention of chaos magic. Some take this fact to mean that Chaos has nothing to do with magic whatsoever, and therefore one might survey the text from a purely scientific standpoint. These poor fools hope to thereby sidestep some part of the dire peril. However, doesn’t it seem odd that a book about chaos contains absolutely no mention of chaos magic? This deliberate ploy appears in stark relief when you consider the various uses that a chaos magic practitioner can put Chaos to: using the lore on phase-transitions as a model for altering consciousness, focusing on fractals to attain so-called “ecstatic states,” and manipulating strange-attractors to allow large-scale reality-engineering.

Latest update: dark rumour even has it that a nefarious chaos-magical order known only as IOTA – possibly the International Organisation of Travel Agents as seen in the documentary Angels in America – now has a review of Chaos on their website, with a link to James Gleick’s Chaos homepage at http://www.around.com/chaos.html