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MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.… (more)
Anthology of short stories on the same theme - what would the world be like if our cause of death (but not time) can be foretold by a machine? The predictions are always accurate, but often opaque. There's a wide range of contributors here, and so the stories are a little uneven. Mostly there's some kind of introspective, philosophical bent to them; of course touching on mortality, but also free will, predestination, fate, technology, fear of technology - lots of stuff. It's good fun and occasionally thought provoking. The stories here were chosen as the best submitted (rather than asking for selections and printing them all) and the producers of the book have various affordable ways of reading it (I got it cheap at the SPX comics festival - you can read it for free on their website: http://machineofdeath.net/about/book).
I enjoyed the book, and (perhaps more) am excited and interested to see how they are experimenting with new collaborative publishing models. Check out their website: ( )
Really, this deserves a 4.5; I was torn between giving it a 5 and a 4 and only opted for the 4 because a 5 really should be, "I would retrieve this from a burning building." A comment which I realize is unintentionally apropos... ( )
Basically one of the Dinosaur Comics mentioned the idea of a book in which all the stories are about a machine that predicts how people are going to die. So a bunch of other cartoonists and writers wrote such stories, and then they put them into a book.
The stories are pretty good. There are a lot of twist endings, and a few meta-twist endings?
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
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Book description
Machine of Death is published under a Creative Commons license, rather than traditional copyright. The specific license is BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 license).
Information about the creation of the book and access to podcasts of the individual stories can be found at http://machineofdeath.net
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I enjoyed the book, and (perhaps more) am excited and interested to see how they are experimenting with new collaborative publishing models. Check out their website: (