Premisa inicial: se inventa una máquina que, mediante una muestra de sangre, predice sin posibilidad de fallo no cuándo, sino cómo morirás. La máquina es infalible y muy puñetera. Si te dice que morirás de "vejez", igual te atropella un viejo. Si te dice que morirás en un accidente de barco, puedes evitar el mar todo lo que quieras, que te acabará cayendo un encima un barco de lo alto de un camión.

Dada esta explicación, parece que todos los relatos van a tratar sobre gente intentando escapar de su inexorable destino y que acaba encontrando una irónica y divertida muerte. Algunos tratan de esto, pero, como cualquier obra que trate la muerte, lo que importa no es el destino, sino el viaje. Si a los dieciocho años nos dicen cómo moriremos, pero no cuándo, ¿cómo nos afectaría esta noticia?

Si eres feliz con tu vida, pero te dicen que morirás suicidándote, ¿qué harías? Igual te deprimirías tanto que acabarías suicidándote. Quizá sea una profecía autocumplida. ¿Si no te hubieran dicho lo del suicidio, te habrías suicidado? O igual te dicen que morirás de un ataque al corazón. Entonces dejarás de fumar, de beber, empezarás a comer sano, te harás célibe, evitarás las emociones fuertes... Es una noticia que te afectará el resto de tu vida, una vida que, a partir de ese momento, será muy aburrida. Y, sin embargo, acabarás muerto por un ataque al corazón. Esto no es como en Flashforward, aquí el destino está prefijado y, hagas algo, o no hagas nada, no puedes cambiarlo.

El libro es ciencia ficción soft. Obviamente, en ninguno de los relatos se da explicación alguna sobre qué hace funcionar tal diabólica máquina, apenas unos vagos apuntes sobre genética y probabilidades. Pero sigue siendo ciencia ficción porque plantea la pregunta "¿y si...? e intenta responderla desde tantos prismas como treinta y cuatro relatos contiene el libro.

Este libro está publicado con licencia Creative Commons. Eso quiere decir que puede descargarse de forma gratuita en PDF (y en línea desde Goodreads, en la edición ebook), pero también se puede comprar para apoyar a los autores, que en muchos casos no son profesionales. Ahora mismo el ebook vale 6 USD, pero yo lo compré bastante más barato en su día. Si no te fías, puedes descargarlo gratis y comprarlo luego si te gusta.

El libro vale la pena. No hay un solo relato malo, algo raro en una recopilación de relatos cortos, pero es que se escribieron específicamente para este libro. Son relatos buenos, muy buenos o excelentes que te entretienen y te hacen pensar, y esperemos que no para deprimirte sobre nuestra inexorable mortalidad. Como dicen en el libro de ciencia ficción más vendido de todos los tiempos: "comamos y bebamos, que mañana moriremos". ¡Fiesta!

This anthology was a sleeper hit for me. The central concept of a machine who told people how they would die just with a simple test spawned a collection of diverse and insightful stories that made you laugh, think or both.

This is a great collection of short stories inspired by a premise that first appeared in Dinosaur Comics: there's a machine that can tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you're going to die. Not when and not anything specific.

I really liked that idea when I first read it in the comic, and I loved what the writers of these stories did with it. I didn't enjoy all stories equally, but I was surprised by the many different approaches and directions the stories took.

Usually, I'm not a big fan of short stories, but I enjoyed these a lot.

Weird little book, but I enjoyed it.

This is a cool concept: a bunch of stories by different authors with a shared premise: there’s a machine that tells you (cryptically) how you will die.

The book felt very long to me; while most of the stories did have something unique to offer, I think I’d have liked the book more if it had been more selective.

Some favorites:

- David Malki !’s “Cancer”, in which a dying man’s wife seeks hope from dubious sources, to the frustration of her son

- Ryan North’s “Murder and Suicide, Respectively”, which considers how the machine

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could be used for faster-than-light communication and sending messages to the past

- Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s “Exhaustion From Having Sex With a Minor”, which is probably the winner for most horrifying means-of-death prediction imaginable

- Another by Malki !: “Cocaine and Painkillers”, in which a sleazy infomercial company is tasked with selling the machine but isn’t told what it actually does

- Jeff Stautz’s “Loss of Blood”, set in a world where

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the government proactively kills people in their predicted manner, in order to minimize collateral damage

- James L. Sutter’s “Miscarriage”, where

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hopeful parents’ dreams hang on the machine’s prediction

- Randall Munroe’s “?”, in which the protagonist deduces from the machine’s behavior that

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there must some intelligent being controlling the world, and tries to get that being’s attention

- T. J. Radcliffe’s “Cassandra”, containing

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the most sophisticated attempt by a protagonist to prevent her prediction from coming true

Obvious question: if such a machine existed, would you want to use it? It seems like a bad deal to me, since it doesn’t tell you when you’re going to die (if it did, I’d be totally on board), and it’s prone to technically-correct-but-wildly-misleading ways of describing the cause of death. It offers anxiety but no real information. Sheer curiosity might make it hard to resist, though.

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A clever concept executed really well by a bunch of excellent writers. I was constantly surprised by the different angles the writers used to approach the material. It all makes for an incredibly engaging and unique collection of short stories. In fact, it made me consider my own mortality and what fate would be printed on my own slip of paper. On second thought, scratch that, I don't want to know!

Such a new type of read for me. An interesting anthology...if you enjoy the Netflix series "Black Mirror" this book may be worth reading. Some of the stories are better than others, some have cryptic meanings and tongue-in-cheek endings that are over my head, but I enjoyed most of them regardless.

Some of these were OK, but too many of them were too similar to each other.