'Fascinating. Lucid. Compelling. It's clearly one of the best books on this growing, vital subject, and the one I would heartily recommend to beginners. With wit, humour, anecdotes, and a lot of style, it captures the excitement and drama that make complexity theory one of the hottest fields around.' Michio Kaky, author of Hyperspace 'Science journalism at its best, succinctly covering an impressively wide range of recent results and carefully tracing back their roots.' Karl Sigmund, Nature