Endlessly inventive and compellingly readable, neuroscientist David Eagleman’s SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives presents a range of possibilities for the world that comes (or does not come) after death. Beautifully written, these vignettes lead us through imaginative afterlives born of science, religion, economics, and the highs and lows of human nature.
In some afterlives, you are a compendium of your experiences — relived in a reverse order, or relived in packets of time (all your pain together, your hours of driving, of sleeping, of clipping your nails); in others, you are surrounded only by people you knew, or entirely by strangers, In some afterlives, God is a woman, a married couple, an alien, or a man whose favorite book is Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is cared for by angels. In one afterlife we are God’s organs, in another, we expand enormously and uphold the cosmos; in yet another, the afterlife is privatized and computerized, and you live forever in a virtual world.
Every afterlife in Eagleman’s hands is turned, in precisely penned and moving prose, into a complete world unto itself. SUM encourages us to imagine an infinite array of possibilities, and offers us forty brilliantly original glimpses of what may be the world that awaits us.
