Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds proposes that media should not be understood narrowly as technical channels of human communication, but as elemental environments: sea, sky, fire, earth, clouds, calendars, bodies, infrastructures and archives that organise perception, memory, orientation and collective life . The book’s central intervention is to displace media theory from its fixation on messages, screens and digital devices towards the deeper material conditions that make communication possible in the first place. In the introduction, Peters argues that humans have always lived “in medias res”, surrounded by agencies and systems that precede intentional expression, from weather and writing to logistics and databases. This reframing unsettles the assumption that media are merely instruments placed between senders and receivers; instead, media are the conditions of intelligibility through which worlds become habitable, navigable and shareable. The opening chapter, visible in the uploaded pages, develops this claim by revisiting older traditions of media thought, including McLuhan, Kittler and infrastructural theory, to show that media operate not only through representation but through leverage, storage, transmission, processing and environmental arrangement. A specific case study emerges in Peters’s treatment of clouds: clouds are at once meteorological forms, visual archives, metaphors of divine opacity and contemporary figures of digital storage, thereby condensing the book’s larger argument that media are both natural and technical, atmospheric and institutional. Consequently, the “cloud” is not simply a corporate server metaphor but a philosophical image of mediation itself: diffuse, material, unstable and world-forming. Peters ultimately invites media studies to move beyond device-centred analysis and to recognise that communication is embedded in elemental systems whose ordinary invisibility is precisely what grants them power.