Elaine Walker

Let's have full disclosure at the outset, shall we? Elaine Walker first crossed my radar in 2001 when I began hearing about her work in microtonal and electronic music. (OK, this isn't a review about me, but I looked this up today, so I'll inflict it upon you... I had read about her microtonal work and heard a sample somewhere; then I described the work to someone on a music-related mail list, and almost instantly got a pointer to her name and her band Zia, on May 29, 2001.)

So I've been show more occasionally following her career for quite a while (through binoculars from a distance as one does when traveling out in the field), and I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that helped fund this book's production, starting in 2014. I cherish my signed copy, by the way, so I bought the Kindle version to actually read and I keep the paperback copy pristine. I guess that's an endorsement.

This is apparently Ms Walker's first book, aside from academic work. It is a very interesting and broad look at the Cosmos and the place of humanity in it, from sub-atomic particles to the large scale structure of space-time; from fractals and non-linear systems to human consciousness and curiosity. The writing is excellent, and the copy-editing is good.

The book is presumably written for the educated, curious lay-person. It offers basic explanations of chaos theory and a number of areas important to the philosophical outlook. It provokes thought in many areas. But the reader is also kind of expected to know a tiny bit about recursion, stochastic processes, basic algebra, and (LOL) what "noise floor" means.

I'm not sure that after only one reading I can make any kind of capsule explanation of what it's about, except to say that it's about the natural interconnectedness of absolutely everything, and the kinds of processes that are happening everywhere all the time at every level, and how humans abstract them. As I was reading through it, I found myself agreeing with pretty much all of her observations about humanity and societies. (Well, we may differ some on opinions about economics and private capital, but we won't go into that here.) Throughtout the book she is vastly more optimistic than I am about the future of humanity, and life on our planet in general.

She covers a lot of ground, and space, with a bird's eye view, pointing the way for readers to make their own deeper journey through the territory. I view this book as a good starting point for the author to further develop this philosophical outlook, and I hope she follows up with perhaps some essays on specific areas that could be fleshed out with more detailed treatment, or even another book.

I could also see this as being a good foundational text for some kind of college-level interdisciplinary course, perhaps in a Philosophy or general Humanities department. show less