Preview of The Chain of Chance Summary:

Lem is a social philosopher whose vision is largely independent of ideological or economic particulars. In The Chain of Chance, he records and extrapolates trends which our civilization may display purely by virtue of having exceeded a certain numerically critical mass. His principal theme is that, at that point, certain structural regularities may begin to emerge spontaneously, in the same sense that the chaotic Brownian movements of gas molecules emerge as observable macro-properties...