This Is Chaos, edited by Peter J Carroll
It's got quite a range of offerings, not all of which were to my taste; but of course that's how it is with anthologies. Personal takes on the history of CM from Pete Carroll and Jaq Hawkins, some good articles full of basic practical hints, and just for variety, one of those pieces which tell you how you must do magic. Lionel Snell is of course represented, with a great piece, Virtual Reality, Cybermagick and the Future of Chaos , resuming one of the main themes of his work over the last 50 years - VR. He is the man who invented Johnstone's Paradox, the idea that, if it's ever going to be actually possible to upload human-level consciousness into computers, then the odds are we are already living in such an emulation. This theory is now claimed without attribution by shameless plunderers of Lionel's originality. The essay ends with this computer analogy, symbolizing coding as magic, and the consensus world as the desktop: 'The moral of m...