Sum: Tales from the Afterlives - David Eagleman

Category: Adults, Anthology, Contemporary, Spiritual & Religious
Language: English
Keywords: metaphysical

Written by David Eagleman
Read by Harriet Walter, Jack Davenport, Clarke Peters, Lisa Dwan, Lemn Sissay, Noel Fielding, Jarvis Cocker, Gillian Anderson, Nick Cave, David Eagleman, Stephen Fry, Kerry Fox, Emily Blunt
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Mixed
Unabridged

Release Date: June 7, 2010
Length: 2 hrs 45 mins
Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Sum shows us 40 wonderfully imagined possibilities of life beyond death.

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 the afterlife contains only people 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.

Many versions of our purpose here are proposed; 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 tales—at once witty, wistful and unsettling—are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence while asking the key questions about death, hope, technology, immortality, love, biology, and desire that expose radiant new facets of our humanity.