This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death
by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 1455529397 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 1455529397 Global Overview for this book
2 journalers for this copy...
I got this follow-on to Machine of Death from Barnes and Noble, intrigued by the premise: a machine that can accurately tell people how they'll die (not when, mind, and as for "accurately", it's arguable - a result of "old age" might sound reassuring until you consider that being run over by a very elderly driver might also qualify... ), and the many different ways authors spin this into stories or comic strips. The contributors include BCer N8an, whose other work I've enjoyed - and whose LiveJournal reviews of the stories in the book attracted me to it in the first place, and David Malki, whose Wondermark web comic I like, as well as many other authors and artists.
This is the kind of book that's hard for me to write up, because I liked it so much that it's completely studded with little "page to cite" bookmarks, and I'd wind up quoting half of the book! But I'll try to stick to a few highlights.
I was very impressed with the variations-on-the-theme, which range from an individual character's feelings about whether or not to use the machine to futuristic stories in which the long-term use of the machine has changed society completely. There are even elements of humor, as in "Shiv Sena Riot", a story in which the main character is a phone-support staffer in India (where the machines are not readily available at all), answering questions from American customers...
Among my favorites:
"Old Age, Surrounded by Loved Ones," by 'Nathan Burgoine; this one posits that the machine will generate two death cards whenever one of a set of identical twins uses it, but there's no way for the twins to tell which card belongs to whom. This spins out into a truly touching story in which the Machine of Death plays a part, but does not get in the way of the relationships. Memorable and very moving!
"Zephyr," by George Page III, takes the machine-of-death concept a bit farther; while the machine does not provide a time of death, ways have been found to estimate the time of death based on clusters of death-types, and this is used by the military to set up squads of soldiers with the same rough death-dates. This makes them effectively immortal up until the predicted date - not 100%, but pretty good - and as the death-date approaches the squads can be used effectively for suicide missions. The story takes this idea and introduces us to a highly-effective squad, with the death type and estimated date of each, and results in a fast-moving story with some unexpected elements. I could imagine an entire novel based on this one.
"Lazarus Reactor Fission Sequence" by Tom Francis is a darkly hilarious "mad scientist" story in which all the characters do their level best to "game" the machine-of-death information. For example, people whose cause of death is any type of slow-moving cancer are used as agents in risky situations, as they're invulnerable to any other kind of death - but the mad scientist has been known to cleverly rename his own guards, weapons, or structures such that an enemy could be shot by "Thyroid Cancer". There's a LOT of delightful trickery, and the mad-scientist narrator manages to be both a super-villain and rather sympathetic at the same time; very entertaining story.
"Screaming, Crying, Alone, and Afraid" by Daliso Chaponda has perhaps the most terrifying title-death in the collection - and not without reason, as the story turns out to be a murder mystery that's solved via a little help from a black-market death-machine operator.
"Apitoxin" by John Takis features Sherlock Holmes - fans of the Holmes stories will get the title immediately, though the way it's applied is a bit sneaky. I liked the period setting, and found it a very effective story.
"Blue Fever" by Ada Hoffmann is set in a fantasy world, where a trained "death singer" works for the region's ruler, coming up with songs describing his machine-of-death fate in various ways, designed to suggest wildly heroic possible versions of his death. [Attempts to insert more realistic but less noble options are... frowned upon.] When the ruler demands that his death-singer create a song for a visiting dignitary, though, the singer faces a tough decision - disobedience would be fatal, but if the song offends the visitor, her own punishment could be worse. I really enjoyed the world-building in this story, as well as the ways in which the singer copes with these tricky political maneuverings.
"Monsters from the Deep" by David Malki! combines some Lovecraftian-esque monstrosities with the machine-of-death concept, for a surprising - and delightfully creepy - story.
"Toxoplasmosis of the Brain..." by Gord Sellar touches on the possible uses that governments might make of machine-of-death knowledge - here, an African nation interns people with any cause of death that might be related to HIV, whether they test positive for the disease now or not. This one's all too believable, and chilling.
"Cancer" by Ryan North takes inspiration from the real-life tale of Henrietta Lacks, and melds it with a love story between two women, one of whom gets a baffling variety of *different* death cards - because each of her cells is apparently being given individual deaths. Intriguing premise, well-handled.
"Blunt Force Trauma Delivered By Spouse", by Liz Argall - this one's another most-terrifying-title candidate, dealing with exactly what it says: a woman in fear of spousal abuse, but unsure what to do about it, especially with the always-right prediction from the machine of death. Her choices here are all painful ones, and the story seems to depict the battered-spouse psychology with uncomfortable accuracy.
"Meat Eater" by John and Bill Chernega is a black-humor story-for-children, introducing them to the wonderful Cause Of Death Testing (CODT) with the help of talking dinosaurs (!).
"Your Choice" by Richard Salter is a choose-your-own-death story, very nicely done too, where the reader gets to decide the path of the story.
One of my favorites in the collection: "In Battle, Alone and Soon Forgotten", by Ed Turner. This one's set in a fantasy world, where armies of orcs all have the same cause of death - and, for most of them, this makes no difference. But Grun decides he's not content with this, and winds up confronting a powerful wizard in search of a way to change his fate - and I was solidly on his side the entire time.
Other stories have riffs on the theme, such as someone who fakes a "cool" death card to impress people, while concealing the much-less-romantic true cause of death; kids who collect rare and unusual death cards try to break in to a neighbor's apartment because it's rumored that he possesses "execution by beheading" - this one goes in a very unexpected direction; a story set in Japan, where school kids introduce themselves with name, blood type - and cause of death; a post-apocalyptic world where the causes of death are "peacefully" or "violently", leading to some interesting - if not always valid - rationales about who to trust; and a far-future world in which an ancient machine-of-death is reactivated, but where the translations of the language confuse "death" and "little death", to... um, considerable confusion...
There are also lots of cartoons strewn between stories, such as one showing "a more sympathetic version of the machine"; someone gets the death-card "skydiving", followed up with another card saying "and it's badass"!
Note: There's a very good unabridged-audio version of this book; I got it from Audible.com.
This is the kind of book that's hard for me to write up, because I liked it so much that it's completely studded with little "page to cite" bookmarks, and I'd wind up quoting half of the book! But I'll try to stick to a few highlights.
I was very impressed with the variations-on-the-theme, which range from an individual character's feelings about whether or not to use the machine to futuristic stories in which the long-term use of the machine has changed society completely. There are even elements of humor, as in "Shiv Sena Riot", a story in which the main character is a phone-support staffer in India (where the machines are not readily available at all), answering questions from American customers...
Among my favorites:
"Old Age, Surrounded by Loved Ones," by 'Nathan Burgoine; this one posits that the machine will generate two death cards whenever one of a set of identical twins uses it, but there's no way for the twins to tell which card belongs to whom. This spins out into a truly touching story in which the Machine of Death plays a part, but does not get in the way of the relationships. Memorable and very moving!
"Zephyr," by George Page III, takes the machine-of-death concept a bit farther; while the machine does not provide a time of death, ways have been found to estimate the time of death based on clusters of death-types, and this is used by the military to set up squads of soldiers with the same rough death-dates. This makes them effectively immortal up until the predicted date - not 100%, but pretty good - and as the death-date approaches the squads can be used effectively for suicide missions. The story takes this idea and introduces us to a highly-effective squad, with the death type and estimated date of each, and results in a fast-moving story with some unexpected elements. I could imagine an entire novel based on this one.
"Lazarus Reactor Fission Sequence" by Tom Francis is a darkly hilarious "mad scientist" story in which all the characters do their level best to "game" the machine-of-death information. For example, people whose cause of death is any type of slow-moving cancer are used as agents in risky situations, as they're invulnerable to any other kind of death - but the mad scientist has been known to cleverly rename his own guards, weapons, or structures such that an enemy could be shot by "Thyroid Cancer". There's a LOT of delightful trickery, and the mad-scientist narrator manages to be both a super-villain and rather sympathetic at the same time; very entertaining story.
"Screaming, Crying, Alone, and Afraid" by Daliso Chaponda has perhaps the most terrifying title-death in the collection - and not without reason, as the story turns out to be a murder mystery that's solved via a little help from a black-market death-machine operator.
"Apitoxin" by John Takis features Sherlock Holmes - fans of the Holmes stories will get the title immediately, though the way it's applied is a bit sneaky. I liked the period setting, and found it a very effective story.
"Blue Fever" by Ada Hoffmann is set in a fantasy world, where a trained "death singer" works for the region's ruler, coming up with songs describing his machine-of-death fate in various ways, designed to suggest wildly heroic possible versions of his death. [Attempts to insert more realistic but less noble options are... frowned upon.] When the ruler demands that his death-singer create a song for a visiting dignitary, though, the singer faces a tough decision - disobedience would be fatal, but if the song offends the visitor, her own punishment could be worse. I really enjoyed the world-building in this story, as well as the ways in which the singer copes with these tricky political maneuverings.
"Monsters from the Deep" by David Malki! combines some Lovecraftian-esque monstrosities with the machine-of-death concept, for a surprising - and delightfully creepy - story.
"Toxoplasmosis of the Brain..." by Gord Sellar touches on the possible uses that governments might make of machine-of-death knowledge - here, an African nation interns people with any cause of death that might be related to HIV, whether they test positive for the disease now or not. This one's all too believable, and chilling.
"Cancer" by Ryan North takes inspiration from the real-life tale of Henrietta Lacks, and melds it with a love story between two women, one of whom gets a baffling variety of *different* death cards - because each of her cells is apparently being given individual deaths. Intriguing premise, well-handled.
"Blunt Force Trauma Delivered By Spouse", by Liz Argall - this one's another most-terrifying-title candidate, dealing with exactly what it says: a woman in fear of spousal abuse, but unsure what to do about it, especially with the always-right prediction from the machine of death. Her choices here are all painful ones, and the story seems to depict the battered-spouse psychology with uncomfortable accuracy.
"Meat Eater" by John and Bill Chernega is a black-humor story-for-children, introducing them to the wonderful Cause Of Death Testing (CODT) with the help of talking dinosaurs (!).
"Your Choice" by Richard Salter is a choose-your-own-death story, very nicely done too, where the reader gets to decide the path of the story.
One of my favorites in the collection: "In Battle, Alone and Soon Forgotten", by Ed Turner. This one's set in a fantasy world, where armies of orcs all have the same cause of death - and, for most of them, this makes no difference. But Grun decides he's not content with this, and winds up confronting a powerful wizard in search of a way to change his fate - and I was solidly on his side the entire time.
Other stories have riffs on the theme, such as someone who fakes a "cool" death card to impress people, while concealing the much-less-romantic true cause of death; kids who collect rare and unusual death cards try to break in to a neighbor's apartment because it's rumored that he possesses "execution by beheading" - this one goes in a very unexpected direction; a story set in Japan, where school kids introduce themselves with name, blood type - and cause of death; a post-apocalyptic world where the causes of death are "peacefully" or "violently", leading to some interesting - if not always valid - rationales about who to trust; and a far-future world in which an ancient machine-of-death is reactivated, but where the translations of the language confuse "death" and "little death", to... um, considerable confusion...
There are also lots of cartoons strewn between stories, such as one showing "a more sympathetic version of the machine"; someone gets the death-card "skydiving", followed up with another card saying "and it's badass"!
Note: There's a very good unabridged-audio version of this book; I got it from Audible.com.
I'm adding this to the Manga Trade box, which will be on its way to BCer HI77 in Florida soon. Hope you enjoy it!
They say you should play
the hand you're dealt,
but it can be hard
when you're shaking.
the hand you're dealt,
but it can be hard
when you're shaking.
