Reviews

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

carrotsoup's review against another edition

dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

wayfaring_witch's review against another edition

5.0

Wanted to read since I heard one of the stories on NPR years ago, and finally got to it.

This is a collection of short stories by David Eagleman about 'the Afterlife.' More so a mix of searches on human existence. This was a great read, and the stories brought up a series of emotions and tugged at my brain.

Highly recommended.

mmmbooqz's review against another edition

2.0

i appreciated the concept, but not enough to read the subtle reiterations of that concept in story form. so, i didn't like it. i wanted to, but couldn't get past the way it felt. it was like watching someone parallel park and they just cant get the car in right. you watch them pull back onto the curb or hit the car behind them in a just large enough space, and its entertaining- but if it goes on for too long you want to knock on the window and ask if they need help or offer to find another spot. i wouldn't mind finding this book in a waiting room, reading a story or two, and then leaving it there. the purchase excitement was 'eh.

munyapenny's review against another edition

reflective relaxing slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

hannah8ball's review against another edition

5.0

This is a great book of short stories, very well written and interesting. Every one is a different take on what the afterlife might be. Great conversation starter or things to think about.

lucyedwardes's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

dayface's review against another edition

5.0

What do you get, if you mix Borgesian mind-bending, a Chiang contemporary perspective, and Kafka's nightmarish parables, and blend them with The Atrocity Exhibition/Invisible Cities/Cosmicomics? You get this wonderful little book of aphorisms.
And I'm selling it short.
It's a portfolio of afterlives; of coping mechanisms. With oscillating weights of micro/macrocosmic perspectives thrust upon our lives from page to page. In many ways, this is an art gallery of human conditions; ways we continue to stay sane without an answer to 'what happens after we die?'
To many, the answer is somewhere between the tales in this book.
As comforting as it is horrifying as it is speculatively profound as it is wonderful.

I felt so seen. So many of my own interpretations, thoughts as I'm drifting to sleep, made it into this book. As much poem in places as it is short story. And the whole thing, in ways, can be seen as a transmodern novella - our novella.
Thank you, David, for composing such a profound, organised, succinct work of art.
---

Favourites include:

Ineffable
Blueprints
Sum
Subjunctive
Death Switch
The Unnatural
Distance
Conservation
Graveyard of the Gods
Mirrors
Reins
Mary
Oz
Apostasy
Reversal

but I sincerely loved them all, except maybe 'Missing.'
---

Summary Notes:

In Sum, you feel all of each proportional moment in serial order -

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

In Egalitaire, God struggles with the paradox of Her creation -

So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.

In Circle of Friends, the afterlife comprises only of the people you recall having met; at first, bliss, but soon, a type of hell -

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.

In Descent of Species, you, overwraught with complexity of living, choose for the simplicity of transforming into a horse -

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.

In Giantess, you are hostage by your saviour from another planet -

Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not.

In Mary, which is amazing, you discover God is a big fan of Frankenstein -

God discovered the principles of self-organization by experimenting with yeast and bacteria. He reveled in the beauty of His inventions. Once He mastered the general principles, His inventions became increasingly sophisticated. With artistic flair He sewed together the astounding platypus, the compact beetle, the weighty woolly mammoth, the glistening pods of dolphins. His skills became razor-sharp and keen, and His accurate fingers fashioned—with blinding ambitious accuracy—all the animals at the limits of His vast imagination.

In The Cast, we are all performers in eachother's respective dreams, hitchhiker's from point to point in a Borgesian, Kaiba-esque chain of internal visions brought to life/death -

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. [...] There is a woman in my dreams whom I see every night, but I can never catch up with her, passing as we do into our next worlds.

In Metamorphosis, one only dies when their name is never said again -

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. So you wait in this lobby until the third death

In Missing, we have a bilateral view on God, misunderstanding of Sex as Gender, and a misunderstanding of homosexuality and asexuality, but with a Stanislaw Lem charm -

Upon close examination, they discovered that the monosexual inhabitants were miserable, crushed like existentialists under a feeling of the absence of something terribly important, something they couldn’t put their fingers on.

In Spirals (which I hoped more from given the name), we are presented with a Lem/Adams circumstance whereupon we were supercomputers deriving a meaning for existence all along. I love the creatures -

At some point in the development of their society, these creatures began to wonder: Why are we here? What is the purpose of our existence? These turned out to be very difficult questions to answer. So difficult, in fact, that rather than attacking the questions directly, they decided it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answers.

In Scales, we are the extremities of God, whose existence relies on our belief, Tinkerbell style -

Sometimes He wonders if we’re doing it on purpose. Are His beloved subjects yearning to know His body, to metastasize throughout His greatness by way of His arterial system? He doesn’t suspect that we’re innocent of the journey.

In Adhesion, we are the results of an experiment on cohesion and community, and how things synchronise and stick together -

They research men and women who are not naturally adherent but are held together by circumstance. Those pressed together by obligation.

In Angst, we are merely celestial being keeping the cosmos afloat, vacationing in the amnesiac bodies we call Humans -

And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

In Oz, you peel back the curtain and... Discover wisdom -

And there you see the face. Indeed, it is larger than the moon’s orbit. It is a sight beyond the pens of lyric poets.

In Great Expectations, the familiar concept of an afterlife through digital uploading is subverted by the way it doesn't work -

Although He doesn’t say it, everyone knows what He’s thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired.

In Mirrors, which is stellar, we are the amalgam of all who have observed us, and exist in their eyes, and therefore deteriorate into the nothingness we started with, before needing to confront each part of ourselves from scratch, therefore killing ourselves -

You’re losing you, but you don’t seem to care. There’s only a little bit of you remaining now, the core of you: naked consciousness, bare as a baby.

In Perpetuity, only sinners are granted the everlasting -

But they’re both wrong. In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well.

In The Unnatural, you restart life with 'death' removed, and suicide becomes normalised, and all else collapses -

There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment. People take more naps. There’s no great rush.

In Distance, you ask God why he keeps away from Us, where he replies he once lived among us -

“But one day I came to one of my homes and found that all the windows had been broken.”

In Reins, we are presented with a God akin to Kafka's Poseidon, condemned to his obsessive meticulousness out of passion -

Very few people visit Him anymore. He finds Himself lonely and misunderstood.

In Microbe, we are granted the most microcosmic perspective of existence and God -

So although we supposed ourselves to be the apex of evolution, we are merely the nutritional substrate.

In Absence, Heaven is a garden project (much like Earth) started by a God who disappeared -

Some people hypothesize that God is never planning to return. Others say God went crazy; others assert He loves us but was called away to spawn new universes. Some say He is angry, others say He contracted Alzheimer’s.

In Will-o'-the-Wisp, Heaven is a library room complete with omniscient surveillance of Earth, so you can see the status of the people and things you left behind... For a while -

They don’t understand they’ve been blessed with insulation from the future, while the sinners are cursed in the blue-green glow of the televisions to witness every moment of it.

In Incentive, Heaven is, in fact, the other side of life - for half of us are actors, the other beneficiaries, who flip back and forth at the behest of a director ad infinitum -

If you play your part well, you can more quickly leave this acting job.

In Death Switch, a transient, ethereal, conceptual afterlife exists when we create Death Switches which can do things electronically after our deaths, allowing our presence on Earth to continue -

By the time we die and our death switches are triggered, there will be nothing left but a sophisticated network of transactions with no one to read them: a society of emails zipping back and forth under silent satellites orbiting a soundless planet.

In Encore, our Creators replicate a form of us inspired by the data they had of our current existence -

The Creators watch none of the details as our lives unfold. They could not care less. Only afterward do they become interested again, when they have the opportunity to do what they do best: create.

In Prism, all versions and ages of you at all times of your 'known' existence exist at once -

The you that existed as a single identity is now all ages at once. These pieces of you no longer get older but remain ageless into perpetuity. The yous have transcended time.

In Ineffable, death is something that happens to all things, and those things, too, have afterlives -

When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person—it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. [...]In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.

In Pantheon, there are a near-infinite array of Gods, all fighting and coordinating, all sharing a link: us -

Despite the best guesses of erstwhile civilizations, the gods do not hold dominion over categories of war, love, and wisdom. Instead, the divisions are much finer-grained. One god has control over objects that are made of chrome. Another over flags. Another over bacteria. The god of telephones, the god of bubble gum, the god of spoons.

In Impulse, there is no true afterlife, as there is none for computer chips (which we are) except we have a glitch, a virus -

But it turns out that a tiny, unexpected bug has crept into the program, an anomalous algorithm that the Programmers did not intend and have not yet detected: our consciousness.

In Quantum, you are granted the infinite variety of... The infinite... And come to find pleasure in simplicity -

In the afterlife you can enjoy all possibilities at once, living multiple lives in parallel. You find yourself simultaneously eating and not eating.

In Conservation, we are all parts of a single story featuring a singular protagonist, quark (very Cosmicomics) -

If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. [...] Then, on an afternoon that would come to be known by our physicists as the Day of Decline, the quark suffered an epiphany. It realized it had reached the limits of its energy. Its stories had grown too baroque and rococo to be contained by the maximum speed of its pencil strokes. [...] As the decline continues, you will someday turn a familiar corner to find buildings missing. At some point you may look through the missing walls of your bedroom to find your lover only half drawn.

In Narcissus, we are cameras for cartographers, created to craft maps -

In the afterlife you receive a clear answer about our purpose on the Earth: our mission is to collect data. We have been seeded on this planet as sophisticated mobile cameras. [...] Day after day, with sinking hearts, the Cartographers scroll through endless reels of useless data.

In Seed, God is an inventor, artist, and creator, entertaining us with His wonders, but growing weary at our evolution, learns His own limitations -

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He’s not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. [...] Recently He has run into an unforeseen problem: our species is growing smarter. While we were once easy to awe, dragging knuckles and gaping at fire, we have replaced confusion with equations.

In Graveyard of the Gods, even Gods come back to Heaven - everything comes back - and this, in itself, is a type of Hell -

After you arrive and look around for a while, it becomes obvious that anything that once existed enjoys a continued existence. [...] Although the gods choose to congregate together out here, the truth is that they cannot stand one another. They are confused because they have found themselves here in the afterlife, but they still, deep down, believe they are in charge. [...] There is only one thing they appreciate about this afterlife. Because of their famed vengefulness and creativity in the arts of torture, they find themselves impressed by this version of Hell.

In Apostasy, God is a Borgesian contraption of concept, frightened Her existence will be found by those capable of blinding themselves to the unbearable light-deluge of ideas propounded by others in order to find Her -

In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. [...] She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole. [...] And this is why She was always leery of apostates, those who rejected the particulars of their religion in search of something that seemed more truthful. She disliked them because they seemed the most likely to float a correct guess.

In Blueprints, we are all lines of code, and this is not a deterministic thing, but an argument of values and probable possibilities -

The Rewarder whispers into one of your ears, Isn’t it wonderful to understand the code? The Punisher hisses into your other ear, Does understanding the mechanics of attraction suck all the life out of it? [...] This game always ends in disappointment for both sides, who are freshly distraught to learn that being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience.

In Subjunctive, Heaven and Hell are defined by a metric of perfection, or relative success, as infinite versions of You are subjected to infinite rivalry -

And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.

In Search, we de-atomise upon death (wrong term, but these are notes), and are in a constant, pleasant state of reincarnated relocation, envoys of energy and life aiming to converge upon a singular point, one day -

In the moment before death, you are still composed of the same thousand trillion trillion atoms as in the moment after death—the only difference is that their neighborly network of social interactions has ground to a halt. [...]

In Reversal, You peek into the depiction of the Afterlife that has forever brought me the most comfort, though in truth it is a combination of a few here; that is, big-bang quantum reversal timey-wimey fun -

On the way back, the cloth of that story line unravels. Reversing through the corridors of your life, you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.

peawilliams's review against another edition

5.0

I would rate this book as 10 stars if I could. Fascinating and thought-provoking. I read it on Kindle but I'm going to buy another in paperback so that I can make notes / use it to trigger off story ideas for my own writing :) Bravo!

clarat18's review against another edition

4.0

I can’t tell if this book is fantastic or it’s just the memorable stories that are fantastic. As I got further into the 40 stories there were clear repeating themes, repeating ideas, etc. Yes, some of these stories are incredible and yes, I would recommend it, but at a certain point it seemed better for some to be more fleshed out and some to just be cut.

alexmayo9's review against another edition

reflective

2.25