SFist Interviews: David Eagleman, Author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Mr. Eagleman will be reading this evening at Rakestraw Books in Danville, and tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Books Inc. at Opera Plaza in SF. He spoke with SFist this week in the midst of his book tour.
SFist: How do you define "the afterlife" in Sum? Where did your fascination with ideas of the afterlife begin?
David Eagleman: When I was younger I asked a rabbi whether Jews believed in an afterlife, and, if so, what the afterlife looked like. He answered, "You ask two Jews, you'll get three opinions." I was deeply impressed by the freedom of opinion implied by that answer. I think that brief conversation was probably the seed which turned into Sum about a decade later.
Why did you choose to write on this subject, the afterlife, given your scientific background?
Stories of afterlives seem to unmask what is important to us in the here-and-now. In the process of reading Sum, one begins to see that the stories are not really about the afterlife so much as they are lenses that point back to our own lives. The afterlife is used here as a playing field in which to explore larger issues.
Which is your favorite story in the collection, if you have one?
I have no single favorite story; it is the juxtaposition of 40 mutually exclusive stories that gives the book its fuel. Working in different directions, each story shakes up some basic concepts. In one story, God is a married couple getting a divorce; in another, God is a species of cartographers who have built us as planetary rovers to collect data; in another, God is the size of a bacterium and does not know we exist because we are at the wrong spatial scale. In one story, we are giant ten-dimensional creatures taking a vacation by projecting ourselves into the tiny bodies of earthlings; in another, the afterlife is populated by all the versions of you that could have existed if you had made different choices; in another, our life runs backwards after the expansion of the universe reverses and you are confronted with all the details you mis-remembered. The ideas are all driven by the joy of shining a flashlight around the possibility space.