Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives [Paperback]

David Eagleman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 12, 2010

At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now.  In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been.  With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime's worth of accumulated acts, as he suggests in Sum, spending six days clipping your nails or six weeks waiting for a green light? Is heaven a bureaucracy, as in Reins, where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world, as suggested in Great Expectations, where God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us? Or is God actually the size of a bacterium, battling good and evil on the battlefield of surface proteins, and thus unaware of humans, who are merely the nutritional substrate? Mostly, the author underscores in Will-'o-the-Wisp, humans desperately want to matter, and in afterlife search out the ripples left in our wake. Eagleman's turned out a well-executed and thought-provoking book. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

A slender volume of bite-size vignettes, Sum appears to be a whimsical novelty, amusing for idle perusal but quickly forgotten. In it, neuroscientist Eagleman offers 40 fates that may await us in the afterlife. A close reading of each carefully measured chapter provides an insight into human nature that is both poignant and sobering. In one afterlife, you relive all your experiences in carefully categorized groups: sleeping 30 years straight, sitting five months on the toilet, spending 200 days in the shower, and so forth. In another, you can be whatever you want, including a horse that forgets its original humanity. There are afterlives where you meet God, in one a God who endlessly reads Frankenstein, lamenting the tragic lot of creators; in another a God, female this time, in whose immense corpus earth is a mere cell. Eagleman’s engaging mixture of dark humor, witty quips, and unsettling observations about the human psyche should engage a readership extending from New Age buffs to amateur philosophers. --Carl Hays --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307389936
• ISBN-13: 978-0307389930
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (147 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #45 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Metaphysical

More About the Author

I'm a neuroscientist during the day and a writer at night. As a believer in the endeavor of popular science, I travel frequently to give public lectures. It has been an incredible pleasure to meet warm, funny, like-minded readers everywhere I visit.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 139 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful book full of paradoxes and unexpected insights February 13, 2009

By Leo McMarley

Format:Hardcover

Occasionally a book comes along of such originality that it stops you in your tracks, of such sharpness that it makes you think again about so many things and of such warmth that it makes you want to share it with everyone you meet. David Eagleman's Sum is just such a book.

Ostensibly a book about what happens after we die, ironically Sum is really an examination of what it means to live. After all the divide is perhaps not as great as we think and as John Keats once wrote, "Life is but a Waking Dream."

In the course of these 40 imaginings of the afterlife, Eagleman takes you on a long and varied emotional journey. Some of the Sums are absurd and surreal, others are poigant and poetic, others are funny and wild, some are neurologically cutting edge while others are dreamily abstract. It's an astonishing feat of the mind and to top it all, they are all written is this clear and limpid prose that is a joy and completely effortless to read.

I have a feeling that this book is going to become one of these word of mouth sleeper hits. There are at least 20 people I plan to give it to straight away and everyone I have read snippets of it to has immediately responded to its humanity and humour.

I'm sure that at least one or two of reviewers of this book will be tempted to write, "Greater than the Sum of its parts", because that is exactly what it is. Enjoy and dream and smile and weep.

67 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "In the afterlife you meet God....She is the elephant described by blind men..." February 24, 2009

By K. M. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

We live in a universe that doesn't simply lay its mysteries at our feet. Mystics, philosophers, theologians, and scientists all, in their own way, posit theories, beliefs, and "knowledge," about the existence of God and an afterlife. This inherent confusion opens the door for further "what ifs" about who, what, where, and when runs our cosmos and what kind of "life" might follow physical mortality. Neuro-scientist David Eagleman has seen his opportunity to contribute to the melee. His Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives plunges right in, brashly inventing new benchmarks for Divine behavior and eternal life. This small book of only 110 pages brims over with ideas as each vignette envisions a different, often ironic and amusing, afterlife.

For instance, there is "Distance" which allows "us" to ask God face to face why He lives in a palace far, far away instead of " 'in the trenches with us.' " God replies he used to live among us, but " '[o]ne morning I awoke to find people picketing in front of my driveway.' "

And "Circle of Friends" tells of an afterlife in which each person exists on an earth peopled only by those he or she knew in life -- for most people about "0.00002 percent of the world's population. "The missing crowds make you lonely."

Eagleman's biological expertise makes stories such as "Descent of Species" especially lucid and rich reading. The former asks what would happen to a weary sentient being -- say, you -- who decides to reincarnate as a lower species -- say a horse. What would happen to your capacity to make a higher choice during the next life/death cycle? After all: "The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward...and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from a distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away...."

One of the most intriguing tales is "Mary" in which Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (Enriched Classics), sits on a throne in heaven because God so admires her book: "Like Victor Frankenstein, God....has much to say about bringing animation to the unanimated. Very few of His creatures had thought deeply about the challenges of creating, and it relieved Him a little of the loneliness of His position when Mary wrote her book."

SUM is not a conventional religious book per se because it bursts out of established religious thought instead of reinforcing it. These tales conjure versions of the Supreme Being who have more in common with the foible Greek and Norse gods or us than with an image of an omniscient, omnipotent God. These imaginary Capital Beings cry, feel depressed and disappointed, and are uncertain and ignorant. They aren't the emblems of rectitude and glory usually portrayed by Western churches. These are a scientist's fabulous imaginings, not a parson's or a priest's.

This is also a humanist collection. SUM contains forty fables complete with subtle but unmistakable messages about living and loving in the here and now. For example, a person who isn't naturally gregarious who reads "A Circle of Friends" might begin to socialize more. Reading "Descent of Species" is apt to encourage people not to look the gift "horse" of their human life in the mouth....

SUM broadens our spiritual vision as it shines a witty light on forty postmortem worlds that each reach out in clever Aesopian admonition. Plus, it's just fun, fast reading. Don't miss it.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Whimsical play on 'Possibilianism' April 12, 2010

By Sirin

Format:Paperback

This is a short book of 40 tales expousing Eagleman's 'Possibilian' (a neologism he has coined) view of afterlife. Possibilianism is predicated on the assumption that we know far too much to believe in standard religion anymore, given that many core religious texts were written by sand dwelling shepherd type people who knew little outside village, crop and flock, let alone science and metaphysics; and far too little to commit to full blown atheism - given the vast range and scale of the universe, as recent scientific research is uncovering.

Fact is, the wider mysteries of life cannot be solved. So this leaves plenty of scope for imagination. What if, in the aferlife, you meet all alternative versions of yourself - people who took the path you didn't take, versions of yourself who worked a little harder, who pursued that girl a little more forcefully. How would that feel? What if, in the afterlife, you meet God, but he is not the all powerful beast of the Christian religion but a rather confused man who realises the game is up - humans have outsmarted him on all his big conceits, they know more than he ever expected and he can't play the same fear trick as he did in the Old Testament?

Sum is 40 such stories. Some are brilliant - such as story one, where all your life episodes are rearranged in compartmentalised order: 3 years of showering, 2 weeks of pain, three months of looking for stuff etc. Some are quirky neuroscience ideas that don't quite fly off the page.

If you want to find out more about this possiblianism idea, I suggest both reading this book and looking at the clip on Will Self's website of Will Self interviewing David Eagleman about this book, and ideas about the afterlife. Eagleman comes across as an eager young pup who, at his stage of life (38 years old), can happily contemplate the afterlife as a whimsical intellectual exercise. He is not yet old enough to feel the dark chill of extinction, and the personal realisaton that the sands of one's own time on earth are about to run out.