The War Against Chaos is set in a dystopian version of Britain that is similar in its depiction of a grey, shabby, philistine country, to Orwell's 1984. The principal character Hare, is a clerk for a vast conglomerate known as Universal Goods, who is dismissed from his job and his lodgings after his corrupt boss, Jacobs, manipulates evidence against him.

After sleeping rough, Hare is befriended by a community of so-called 'marginals' who live in anarchic communes on the fringes of society. After recuperating, Hare decides to search for his estranged wife, an artist who fled mainstream society after the government closed all art colleges. He encounters another group, known as 'Diggers', who live in abandoned subterranean chambers that were originally intended for use in the event of nuclear war.

A group of young Diggers attempt to seize their own plot of land, but the attempt is a failure, and Hare is obliged to lead a group of fleeing 'marginals' and Diggers into 'the Zone', a mysterious patch of land where, it is rumoured, nothing is able to survive.

Anita Mason was born in Bristol, England. She read English at Oxford, lived in London, and worked in the publishing field for five years.

Mason is the author of multiple novels as well as a number of short stories. Her novels include, The Illusionist (1983), The War Against Chaos (1988), The Racket (1990), Angel (1994), The Yellow Cathedral (2002) and The Right Hand of the Sun (2008). The Illusionist was nominated for the 1983 Booker Prize in the UK.