Customer Reviews

The Edge of Chaos

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I finished The Edge of Chaos on my subway ride home -- and that I took a hardcover book with me on the subway attests to the fact that I couldn't put it down. I love this book! I'm a woman and a mathematician, and this spoke to me on a profound level.

It was a terrific experience for me to read it, and not just because I liked the content. I think I know a lot more about Santa Fe and New Mexico than I ever knew before -- all the images seem very vivid to me and I look forward to visiting there some day to see if what is in my mind's eye matches the reality.

I have stuck post-its throughout the book -- things about which I want to talk to the women in my book group.

I think the most important reason I like this book is that it just happens to strike some resonant chords for me: what is life all about? what is my legacy? will I/it matter? Would age make me resist entering a new relationship? Sophie's death, and Judith's relationship to her. "Jack Molloy is being superseded."

As a mathematician myself I particularly resonated with the quote: "Proving theorems together can be a real aphrodisiac. Discovering something together, knowing it, something nobody else in the world knows."

It was a truly exhilarating read!

Imagine a novel with an arc reminiscent of _Pride and Prejudice, also
a novel of manners, and of landscape. Here, the landscape is the desert
environs of Santa Fe, the cultural milieu the literati in the
intellectual neighborhood of the Santa Fe Institute. The science of
complexity pioneered by SFI provides a backdrop, or a mirror really,
reflecting the quests and soul-searching of the characters. The
chapter titles borrow catch-phrases from complexity studies that
describe modes of qualitative behavior of complex systems.

The title, The Edge of Chaos, refers to Goldilocks zone of complex
systems where all the interesting action is. Here, systems are not so
rigid that they cannot change at all, but not so chaotic that they
immediately dissolve into useless disorder. The edge of chaos is the
fertile zone for self-organizing systems to emerge. It describes where
we live, among other things providing a perfect setting for a novel.

The author introduces her readers to all of these concepts and more, and
at the same time serves up a set of engaging, developing characters
powered by all the usual human foibles, led of course by the pursuit of
love. I highly recommend it as a shrewd and entertaining commentary on both contemporary science and contemporary manners.

This unique book is a multi-faceted reflection on life, the nature and limits to knowing, the hands of fate, the insights of emerging science, and much more. Its subtle and sweeping descriptions of events and their seeming causes, set in contemporary Santa Fe, New Mexico, depict the lives and relationships of leading characters who become gripping and alive under the author's skillful and discerning eye. Their aspirations, relationships and stories are framed in the context of emerging scientific syntheses and insights rooted in the scientific soil of Santa Fe, subtly and clearly portrayed through the experiences of people who, vividly brought to life by Pamela McCorduck, serve as extraordinary and universal examples of a rich spectrum of penetrating descriptions illustrating the interplay of contingency and necessity that characterizes, and so often governs, our paths through the world. This book, uniquely fascinating, stimulates many further reflections.

I am trying to think of the right words to describe this amazing novel. Interesting, adventurous, really smart. Wise. The kind of story, the kind of characters, that rattle around in your head for days after you've finished. The complexity science used as the book's sub-structure is most often and most fashionably re-purposed to explain the play of market behaviors. How grand and strangely moving to see it used to help describe love. In the end, the book does what all great fiction must: it surprises you at the exact same moment that it shows you the inevitable. I just loved it.

I was a trustee of Santa Fe Institute for 14 years, so I'm familiar with the science and scientists in Pamela's wonderful yarn, and with Santa Fe, so I can vouch for her verisimilitude.

A friend described the book as "scientist chick-lit," and it is that. But for this male, instead of being an eye-roller, it's a revelation. I'll take McCorduck over Doris Lessing or A.S. Byatt any day.

AND it's a page-turner.