David Malki !

This is the second anthology of stories (and some cartoons) featuring the Machine of Death. (The first, imaginatively enough, was called Machine of Death.) What is the Machine of Death? It's a mysterious device that, when provided with a blood sample, will tell you how you die. It's short on details, and its answers are sometimes ambiguous, cryptic, or downright misleading, but they're never, ever wrong. No matter what you do.

A lot of the stories in this one expand the original idea in new show more directions. Some put versions of the death machine into different historical periods, the far future, or alternate fantasy worlds. Others toy a bit with the question of how the machine works in the first place. There are several that deal with the idea of fake machines and quite a few that take the idea that a person's death prediction never changes and enjoy trying to find a loophole in it, while others continue to explore the questions of how individuals and societies respond to such a thing.

And my feeling about this volume is much the same as with the first one. Individually, most of these stories aren't necessarily incredibly well-written or interesting (although there some very good exceptions). But a whole kaleidoscope of different explorations and interpretations of this idea is truly compelling, more than enough so to keep me engaged through two fairly thick books. show less

Needless to say, the premise is truly extraordinary, and the very idea makes this collection a must read. Rare are the instances in literature where a unique perspective moves us to face our own mortality in such a straightforward, but at the same time deeply philosophical manner.

Possibly the greatest thrill and appeal of this book is the many different ways in which people have approached the prompt - stories that are set in dystopian societies that have evolved after the machine had been show more introduced, stories that focus on characters and their moral choices, stories that test the relationships between people and their basic humanity in the changed times they live in.

A great challenge that comes with writing a good story for an anthology such as this one is to successfully fit the central theme of the death machine into the rules and idiosyncrasies of the short story genre. To make your story stand out, you not only need a setting as unique and as credible as you can muster, with well-written characters, but you also might want to consider a memorable twist, a clever ending that would be in line with the machine's own wittiness, love for word games, ambiguity, and irony. This would reward the reader's patience and investment into the story, especially since an uncanny number of the stories included here seem to go nowhere - they begin admirably and full of promise, establish the setting, mood, tone, and then fail to satisfy the reader's expectations by abruptly ending, never saying what they had been building up to. The most unsatisfying stories belong to this category.

However, some entries are real gems that comply with one or more of the criteria above. Here are some of my personal favourites:

Flaming Marshmallow - the collection opens in a high school setting where Knowing is of the essence if you want to fit in. Will the machine prove too cool for school?

Almond utilizes a log/journal format to give us insight into the head of a man put in charge of testing the machine and using it on any willing citizens. He records the more interesting predictions and the way people react to them, and things run fairly smoothly until he is forced to face his own fate.

HIV Infection from Machine of Death Needle - Clever. Explores an idea subtly touched upon in other stories as well, most notably in the last entry, where I will briefly visit it as well.

Improperly Prepared Blowfish has one of the most unique and intriguing settings in the entire collection. Combined with a really smart twist ending, it's really one of more impressive tales.

Aneurysm is as fun to read as party games are to play. How fun are party games, exactly, especially when a cool new prop is introduced?

Exhaustion from Having Sex with a Minor gives a thrilling account of one of the most exciting election races to date.

Killed by Daniel is one of those stories I mentioned before that explore the way the machine influences people's relationships and the way they perceive each other. Its charms lie in the show-not-tell principle.

Cocaine and Painkillers is a gripping read that offers us a glimpse into the cruel world of advertising when a big firm faces the challenge of having to sell a new, mysterious product to the public...

Loss of Blood - chilling and imaginative.

While Trying to Save Another takes the prompt and spices it up with a twist that is the pivotal idea of the story, and does a pretty neat job of it.

Heat Death of the Universe is one of the two stories that combine the human perspective with science and so seem to take a step back and consider the big picture. We only know how it ends.

? - a scream into the void, a man's complaint about the blatant unfairness of it all.

Cassandra is another story that uses science to bring us closer to the beauty and terror of the machine and there could hardly be a better note on which to end the collection. show less

The 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 show more 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. show less

There is a machine that, given a sample of your blood, will return a piece of paper with a word, or a few words, printed on it, telling you what you're going to die of. Not when. Not where. Only how. The predictions are often ambiguous or even downright cryptic. Sometimes they're self-fulfilling. But they're always, always right.

Each of the short stories in this collection takes that as its central premise, and takes off from there to explore the idea's social, personal or philosophical show more implications... or simply to have fun with it. Individually, I don't think any of these pieces is especially brilliant. Probably very few of them would stand on their own particularly well outside this anthology. But the premise is so morbidly wonderful, and the way the various authors explore it from different angles so fascinating, that I found the book as a whole completely compelling, in a nifty more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of way. show less