Sum: Tales from the Afterlives - David Eagleman.epub

SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered -- each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.

In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.

These wonderfully imagined tales -- at once funny, wistful, and unsettling -- are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.

PRAISE
"Eagleman is a true original. Read Sum and be amazed. Reread it and be reamazed." - Time Magazine

"SUM is terrific. The inventiveness, the clarity and wit of the prose, the calm air of moral understanding that pervades the whole thing, add up to something completely original." - Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass

"This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments.... It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side." - Alexander McCall Smith, New York Times Book Review

"This little book is teeming, writhing with imagination." - Los Angeles Times

"As rigorous and imaginative as the writings of Italo Calvino and Alan Lightman, each vignette is a glimpse into an expansive topic such as time, faith or memory" - Nature

"David Eagleman's SUM envisions a multiplicity of afterlives: pasts relived in shuffle mode, cast in the dreams of others, and dictated by our credit card reports" - Vanity Fair

"Reading this beautiful book is like pulling back the fabric of reality and peeping behind -- life and death will never seem the same again." - New Scientist

"Imaginative and inventive." - Wall Street Journal

"Reading John Updike you may feel utterly incapable of coming up with such wonderful stuff yourself but, by a process of envious extrapolation, you still have a sense of how he managed to do it. Eagleman is a neuroscientist, that must have helped, but Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius." - Geoff Dyer, The Observer

"With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist generously offers forty variations on the theme of God and the afterlife, imagining what each of us might find when we shuffle off this mortal coil.... Sum is great fun--sort of a brainy parlor game in print--and a modest satire aimed at zealots who define heaven and God to serve their own ends." -Texas Monthly

"Wow." - The New York Observer

"Bracing, provocative, fun... it challenges and teases as it spins out different parables of possibility." - Houston Chronicle