How would you live if you knew how you would die?The premise for this collection of short stories was introduced back in 2005, in an installment of Ryan North's popular Dinosaur Comics. In it, he presents the following premise: there is a machine which, with only a small sample of your blood, can tell you how you will die. But there are no dates, no details, no explanations. Just a few words, and that's it. The Machine is never wrong, but it is annoyingly vague and has a decidedly un-machinelike...

I couldn't pass up reading this collection of stories based on the idea that there is a Machine that has been created that can predict how you will die based on a blood sample you give it. Many are extremely thoughtful and some have a type of ironic twist because you can't always take your card at face value. Although don't look for an ironic twist in all of them, only a few go that route and it's easy to start thinking all of them approach the topic similarly.At the same time, this anthology do...

FELLOW HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHERS!!!!Do you have trouble finding high-quality, high-interest, layered short stories?Do you wanna force your students to talk about dying and fate and whether life has any meaning?Do you have any desire to broach existentialism, in any capacity?WELL HAVE I GOT A BOOK FOR YOU.Premise: there's this machine that -- through time travel and/or blood analysis -- predicts, faultlessly, how you will die. Not when, and not clearly ("boating accident" could mean you crash

I love the concept of this collection; what would happen if there was a machine that could tell you how you would die. Flaming Marshmallow - 5/5Fudge - 4/5Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions - 3/5Despair - 3/5Suicide - 4/5Almond - 5/5Starvation - 3/5Cancer - 3/5Firing Squad - 3/5Vegetables - 3/5Piano - 3/5HIV Infection From Machine Of Death Needle - 5/5Exploded - 3/5Not Waving But Drowning - 4/5Improperly Prepared Blowfish - 4/5Love Ad Nauseum - 5/5Murder And Suicide, Respectively - 4/5Cancer - 3/5...

Last week I bought the Humble Bundle e-book bundle because it had two books I wanted: an XKCD collection and Wil Wheaton's "Just A Geek". The 8 others, including this one (and "The Last Unicorn" incidentally), I saw as gravy. Okay, I don't like gravy, so let's say icing on the cake. Actually, I don't really like frosting either. What is my deal?Anyway. This book was kind of a *bonus*.And hokey smokes, Bullwinkle... what a bonus it is. I'm about halfway through "Machine of Death" and it is rockin...

This is a very interesting collection of short series based on a very simple premise: What if there were a machine that could tell you how you were going to die? The prediction would not be precise, but it would be inerrant. For example, "Old age" might mean you'll die of general organ failure at the age of 99, or because a senior citizen will run you down with his car when you are 35. The stories explore all the various consequences of such a machine, and the places they go are very creative, i...

First line: This book, unlike most others, started its life as an offhand comment made by a bright green Tyrannosaurus Rex.More first lines from the individual short stories:Flaming Marshmallow: I'm so freaking excited I can hardly stand it.Fudge: To any of the countless shoppers passing by, the kiss wouldn't have seemed like much.Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions: "Missus Murphy, I will have you know that I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions."Despair: They died anyway.Suicide: The clerk s...

The short stories that make up this anthology encompass genres ranging from romance to tragedy, horror(ish) to (dark) humor, all with a healthy heaping of science fiction as well. All thirty four of them relate to the same basic premise, first suggested by a lime green T-Rex on the internet; they all revolve around the invention, popularization, and/or use of the "Machine of Death," a device that can tell, from a sample of your blood, your manner of death.As characters discovered in many of the

I haven't read a lot of anthologies in my day, so the following statement may not hold much weight, but: THIS IS THE BEST ANTHOLOGY I HAVE EVER READ.Seriously. Out of the 34 stories in this collection, I was only meh on maybe one or two of them, and I liked all the others. The creativity on display is astounding: the various authors all have different approaches to the concept. How would the world react to the Machine of Death? Would such a machine be banned? Or would it be embraced? Would peopl...

This book is a small subset, of hundreds of short stories submitted, based on a quirky dinosaur comic. A death machine-like a fortune cookie-gives you a slip of paper telling you how you will die. Not when. Not where. Just how, in a few words. Ah, those words can be cruel-for you obvious cause of death, may not be the way you die. Each story starts with a drawing related to the short story-some of these are just awesome. The one for the girl I am not waving, I am drowning-was my favorite. Drowni...

Two words to describe this book: ALL BALLS.A few years ago the editors of this sci-fi anthology conceived of a marketing scheme called "MOD-Day,” one day in which they would encourage everybody they knew to buy MACHINE OF DEATH from Amazon all at once in an attempt to become, for one day at least, Amazon’s #1 best-selling book. The anthology of short stories share a common pretense: they all involve a world in which a machine can predict how people will die. The machine doesn't give too much det...

These were kind of weird stories on how people were for sure on how they will and would die. The illustrations were cute and funny. Those were the best part of the book. Not for me.

As you might expect with a book of this kind, the quality was spotty, the tone was uneven, and the spelling! grammar! typos! Some stories had multiple misused words, which my heart cannot bear. The illustrations to each chapter were cute but didn't add much more interest for me than a calligraphic first letter would have. Still, I think that my biggest issue with this book was its incredible bleakness. The story's premise came from a webcomic, and personally I found it pretty funny; I was expect...

Quite interesting, if somewhat morbid. This is a collection of short stories so there are some good ones and some bland.

Late last year, Glenn Beck of FOX News was prepared to take the #1 spot on Amazon's bestsellers list with yet another ego-feeding poli-historical confabulation that was, quite honestly, destined someday soon for the 49-cent shelf at Goodwill stores all across the country. (If I were writing an honest, respectable review, this is the point where I'd discuss exactly what the book was about rather than hide behind vacuous adjectives. However, at the time I had quite a bit of self-respect left, so I...

I love this book, not just for its cool premise (it's a book of short stories about what life would be like if there was a machine that could predict the way you would die - but not when, or how), but also for the fact that due to a massive online effort it managed to hit #1 on Amazon, beating out Glenn Beck. Not only THAT, but they went ahead and released a free PDF, which is the way I read it. The stories are by both pros and amateurs, each with an illustration, and each titled in a manner of

Machine of Death is one of the oddest themed anthologies I've ever run across. These are all stories—dozens of 'em—inspired by a single comic from Dinosaur Comics, a long-running indie strip by Ryan North (who is, not coincidentally, one of the editors of this very volume).Dinosaur Comics currently appears weekly in our very own Portland Mercury, and I've been reading it for years, but I can't remember having seen the specific inspiration for this book before. The core idea is very simple, thoug...

i added one star purely for how much i love this concept. the machine of death is so morbid and yet i can't say i wouldn't use it if it were real. imagine knowing your death, like how fucked up is that? the stories were generally good but they got rather repetitive and the last few were straight up boring.

"Machine of Death" is a fiction anthology in a universe where there is a machine that can predict the exact cause of an individual's death. Every short story comes starts an illustration. I haven't enjoyed such a high image/word ratio since I was in elementary school, but this anthology is the exception which changes the rule. As far as the content goes: sometimes the Machine was required for the storyline but usually it was part of the background of the story.I was surprised by the huge variati...

The concept (or gimmick, if you prefer) for this anthology of stories came from an episode of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics. In a nutshell, each of these stories is set in a world in which a machine has been invented that tells you how you will die. To quote from the back cover: "The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliv...