This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death
Written by Matthew Bennardo, David Malki I and Ryan North
Narrated by Robert Morgan Fisher, Rachael McCabe, Mandy Kaplan and
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
If a machine could predict how you would die, would you want to know? This is the tantalizing premise of This Is How You Die, the brilliant follow-up anthology to the self-published best seller, Machine of Death.
The machines started popping up around the world. The offer was tempting: With a simple blood test, anyone could know how they would die. But the machines didn't give dates or specific circumstances – just a single word or phrase. DROWNED, CANCER, OLD AGE, CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. And though the predictions were always accurate, they were also often frustratingly vague. OLD AGE, it turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or being shot by an elderly, bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machines held on to that old-world sense of irony in death: You can know how it's going to happen, but you'll still be surprised when it does.
This addictive anthology – sinister, witty, existential, and fascinating – collects the best of the thousands of story submissions the editors received in the wake of the success of the first volume, and exceeds the first in every way.
A Hachette Audio production.
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Reviews for This Is How You Die
57 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good continuation of the "machine of death" concept. Several outstanding stories, and only a few disappointments.Some of best:ApitoxinCancerYour ChoiceIn Battle, Alone, and Soon ForgottenLa Mort d'unRoturier
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What is life like when you know how you will die?
I enjoyed the first Machine of Death book, and I liked this one even more. These authors found a wide variety of ways to play with the basic concept, and set the stories stories in almost-as-diverse locations. Some of the stories are based on non-human characters, adding another layer of creativity to the endeavor. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5To be honest the first 10 stories were great! After that, things got weird and jumped around multiple universes with orcs, aliens, and what-not. Let me say I am a fan of scifi and fantasy, but I don't feel that these stories fit in very well. Regardless, hopefully they will add the prequel (Machine of Death) on audiobook, because it really was an interesting listen.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Once again, the Machine of Death crew has put together a fabulous anthology of stories about people knowing how (but not when... or even super specifically) they will die. And while the foundation is death, the stories are not necessarily disturbing or depressing. There are action/adventure tales, romance stories, mysteries, funny bits, and engaging characters.
Lots of fun (but sometimes sad...) - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Machine of Death tells you how you’ll die, though it’s kind of evil/misleading in its descriptions. From this one concept, many stories grew. In this, the second volume of stories, the authors push harder on the boundaries of the rules, tweaking and even breaking them (in the far future, the machine can tell when the probability of your death is 0 and when it’s 1; a version of the machine existed before the French Revolution; the machine was an indicator of alien invasion; the machine generates an industry of death explainers staffed at a call center in India; quarantines based on cause of death are a new variation on the worst that humans can do to each other; military assassins chosen for having “throat cancer” deaths and thus being unkillable in combat; etc.). I found them mostly quite enjoyable, and I was also proud of myself for identifying M.J. Leitch’s story before reading her name.