Brian Klaas (John Murray (UK) Scribner (US))
IN HIS 1987 bestseller Chaos: Making a new science, James Gleick introduced chaos theory to the public. Basically, it is the study of nonlinear events and how minuscule actions can cause far-reaching disruption. Or, as actor Jeff Goldblum explained in Jurassic Park: 鈥淚t simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems.鈥�
Brian Klaas, an associate professor in global politics at University College London, is all too aware of the unpredictability of modern life: a horrific family tragedy could have prevented his existence. His new book Fluke: Chance, chaos and why everything we do matters seeks to redefine history as less of a storyline, and more a 鈥渟truggle to impose order, certainty and rationality onto a word defined by disorder, chance and chaos鈥�.
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If that sounds defeatist, Klaas鈥檚 accounts of pivotal moments are anything but. For example, he details how a 1997 Zambian coup failed when rebels were unable to hang onto the trouser leg of an escaping general, and how the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 was a last-minute decision based on cloud cover over the original target city of Kokura, about 200 kilometres away.
Klaas maintains that our universe is a mix of convergence, which he defines as 鈥渆verything happens for a reason鈥�, and contingency, or 鈥渟tuff happens鈥�. And this holds true at every scale, even down to separate subatomic particles that somehow maintain a united wave function 鈥� 鈥渟pooky action at a distance鈥�, as Albert Einstein called it.
Klaas speculates on the global impact of events, from the millions of people stranded when one of Iceland鈥檚 volcanoes erupted in 2010 and planes were grounded to the effect on supply chains in 2021 of a single ship stuck in the Suez Canal. And then there is what Klaas sees as one of the most critical flukes: the moment 2 billion years ago when a lone bacterium became a mitochondrion, a 鈥渕icroscopic accident鈥� he cites as accelerating the process of evolution.
The resurgence of populist politics may also have been indirectly caught up in the fluke effect, as leaders worry that they have no easy answers for complex questions and realise that, instead of complex analysis, 鈥渘ovel takes get rewarded鈥�. Fluke makes it clear that this kind of thinking is ultimately futile: chaos seems to lurk inside every cell of our ordered society.
One example Klaas covers in some detail is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 鈥� an event widely seen as having ignited the first world war 鈥� and how it was, in fact, the nobleman鈥檚 third brush with death (he had survived being accidentally shot by a servant on a pheasant shoot in 1913, and a car bomb attack a year later). Would the war have been averted if he had died earlier?
Klaas shares a brutal moment of chance from his own lineage: in 1905, his great-grandfather Paul Klaas came home to find his wife had killed their four children and herself at their Wisconsin home. Paul eventually remarried, fathering the child who would become the author鈥檚 grandparent.
It is a what-if moment as critical to our narrator as a giant asteroid was to Earth 66 million years ago, when its impact released a cloud of sulphur that helped to spell doom for the dinosaurs. Just a minute later, and the asteroid might have hit the more absorbent deeper ocean instead of the gypsum-rich rock under the Yucat谩n peninsula鈥檚 shallow sea.
Can we learn to accommodate the unpredictability of the cosmos, and avoid the pratfalls that come with insisting that life follows a stable trajectory? Klaas recommends we acknowledge that flukes can be as beneficial as they can be cataclysmic.
He also warns against over-detecting patterns and striving for optimisation, which he describes as a 鈥渢ime bomb鈥�. As he explains with a quote from the Tibetan-Buddhist theologian Pema Ch枚dr枚n: 鈥淚f you鈥檙e invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.鈥�
Fluke is provocative and compelling, bringing the complex relationship between order and chaos vividly alive. There is every chance you will love it.
George Bass is a writer based in Kent, UK
