A dazzling work of fiction from a scientist who has shaped his considerable knowledge into equally considerable art: brief vignettes that present a stunning array of possible worlds awaiting us after our earthly lives have ended.

In your afterlife you may find that God is a married couple separated and reunited, or that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence, or that your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures that built us to figure out what they could not. Or you may find the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or provides the content of the dreams of the living, or that humans have brought war to the afterlife with them. In some afterlives you are split into all your different ages; in some you are recreated based on your credit card records; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here: we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for scattered atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what keeps couples together.

In these wonderfully imagined tales--at once funny, wistful, and unsettling--Eagleman kicks over the chessboard of traditional notions and offers us a dazzling lens through which to see ourselves here and now. His stories are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that cuts through human nature at innovative angles, exposing faces never before seen.