Death becomes him

Pondering the afterlife and David Eagleman's remarkable Sum on Dogmatika.

Sum is written as a series of short philosophical propositions or flash fictions, each beginning at the point at which you die. In "The Cast," you are destined to play a cameo role in someone else’s dream. The curse of fame is explored in "Metamorphosis" in which you only truly die when your name is spoken for the last time and you have to stay in a waiting room until that day. In "Circle of Friends," you return to a sparse world that only contains people you’ve met. The pitfalls of reincarnation, as a kind of anti-evolution, are considered in "Descent of Species." We encounter a creator so terrifying the afterlife should be spent as silently as possible ("Giantess"). We find out God’s favourite book is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (suggesting we are his monsters). God is a microbe who has no knowledge of our existence or we are cancer cells in God’s body. God absconds and leaves his angels to riot and go to war with each other over where he is. There are pit-stops at The Wizard of Oz, surveillance culture, the Big Bang, cartography, the perils of technological progress and a world where all the old defunct Gods live out mundane lives. It is to his considerable credit that Eagleman makes these outlandish ideas seem not only vaguely plausible (at least as much as traditional concepts of heaven or hell) but genuinely riveting...