"Sum" imagines the afterlife, 40 different ways

"Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives"

by David Eagleman

Pantheon, 128 pp., $20

Something interesting almost always happens when thinkers with a scientific bent write fiction. (Jonah Lehrer discusses this in "Proust Was a Neuroscientist.") But David Eagleman really is a neuroscientist — he heads the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine. Each vignette here describes a possible afterlife.

"There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." The afterlife is soft in one story, has "San Diego weather" in another. Not surprising, God's favorite book is "Frankenstein," so Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gets her own throne.

God is a woman. God is a married couple. We are God's internal organs. In one afterlife, you relive your life with events shuffled in a different order; for example, you take all your pain at once or spend six days clipping your nails. Another afterlife is made up of only people you know. There's less traffic, but "The missing crowds make you lonely." "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" is teeming, writhing with imagination. It's the Duomo between covers, reinvented and distilled.