MJ Nicholls's Reviews > Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives

My favourite video game of all time is a homemade 2D platformer on the little-known Yaroze—a black, programmable Playstation—called Time Slip . In this game you are a snail with a one-minute lifespan who has to use his time on screen to stand on buttons that open doors to other parts of the level. Once the minute is up, the snail is reincarnated as another snail at the beginning of the level, or at the latest checkpoint. The ghost of your previous snail remains on the map, reliving its movements after its time is up, with more and more fresh snails coming until the map gets clogged up with past selves. If you come into contact with any of your previous snail-selves, it’s game over. This raises quite a profound metaphysical conundrum for a cheapo game coded by two nerds. Imagine if we had the chance to live our lives over, in the same circumstances, with knowledge of our previous selves altering how we moved through the world, but relying on certain foundations having been laid in these previous lives for advancement in our then-present lives. Like concentric Russian dolls whose contact would spell extinction.

Knowing we had freedom to live multiple, or endless lifetimes, with the only caveat no touching our previous selves, how would this effect how we try to solve the frustrations and problems in our present lives, knowing contact with people in our previous lives would be limited to the few moments our past selves weren’t in contact with these people? For example, can you imagine how tiring it must be for someone married to seven reincarnations of the same person, having to tend to all their needs like a revolving-door of husbands/wives? How could we stay away from people, knowing our presence there would increase the chance of our own death? How could we order our lives so that our legacies built up over two hundred or so years? What if we peaked in our first lives, and the subsequent reincarnations are simply failures and frustrations?

Not bad for a Yaroze game—normally it’s variations on Tetris or Space Invaders. These clever short fictions posit such conundrums about the afterlife, from ‘Sum,’ where all the aspects of our lives are arranged in order, i.e. ten years of pain, two weeks writing reviews on Goodreads, or ‘Reversal’ where we live our lives backwards upon death, realising we have misremembered our lives, and are unable to identify ourselves in the rewind. These two tales open and close the collection. Using his background in neuroscience, Eagleman pens delightful hypothetical fables, largely whimsical and ingenious. Daintily packaged and teasingly slim, so almost impossible to resist. I heard about this book via this Intelligence Squared talk with Will Self.