Book Review: Machine of Death

This comic started it all, a little over 5 years ago. The seed idea. What would happen if a machine was invented that could tell you, with a mere sample of your blood, how you were going to die? It's never wrong, although its predictions can be uselessly vague. And that is your fate, regardless of your actions to reject it, embrace it, forget it or ignore it.

Well, it went from a joke in a comic, to folks deciding to make a book about it. They asked writers from all over to contribute stories with the same premise. Then they pulled them all into this book, Machine of Death.

The books authors are also really forward-thinking tech folks. The website for this book has news about it and an increasing number of its short stories available as podcasts. And, the best part, is that you can have the book for free if you want. Yup, completely no-cost and free of DRM. Just openly released under the Creative Commons license. That kind of openness genuinely does make me want to give them money so more publishers follow suit. But I digress.

Machine of Death an interesting read. Good, not great. Its flaws are in its format. Some of the short stories are pithy, uninteresting bits about more mediocre details of daily life living with the Machine of Death. But then there are some amazing tales that I'm really upset to find out they only get one chapter. Each chapter is titled with a prescribed death from one of the characters in its story. My favorites are, in no particular order, Almond, Hiv Infection From Machine Of Death Needle, Exhaustion From Having Sex With A Minor, and Loss of Blood.

Each of these stories don't precisely fit in the same universe, but it could easily be argued that they all in fact do coexist in the same universe, and the minor indiscrepancies are merely do to poor recollection on the part of a character in the story. But the diverse implications of such a device are mesmerizing. Would we establish a minimum national age to be tested by the Machine? Would we try it for a while, then ban it altogether? Would children be tested at birth? Would you become criminal if you refused testing? Could a court order you to get tested to help in a federal investigation?

All these different scenarios play out in the book. It's amazingly intriguing to see the same simple premise have such a diverse array of consequences. There are stories of love, betrayal, science, and politics.

Oddly enough, there aren't many death stories. That was probably the biggest misconception when I began reading it. I was sure that each of these chapter titles would be a death foretold by the Machine, and the story would be about a new character who got this death prescribed to him, and who tried desperately to escape, only to cause his own demise. I mean, I guess that would be a difficult story to re-tell 30 different ways. But I thought it would really be a mystery of just guessing and second-guessing what the interpretation of such a vague death could mean for the current protagonist.

But it's really not about that. Not all the stories end with someone dying. Just because some predictions can be vague, doesn't mean that all of them are. They do tend to make for interesting stories, though.