Last week Stephen Fry twittered about Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by US neuroscientist David Eagleman, and the book increased its sales several thousand per cent. Fry isn't the first to be dazzled (one review said it had the "jaw-dropping quality of genius"), nor is he the only well-known fan – Philip Pullman has praised it, Brian Eno has set it to music. So what's all the fuss about?
The whole of Sum is much more than its parts – 40 short stories exploring the meaning of life and death, proposing different hypotheses of the afterlife. In one story, humans were created to be "mobile cameras", recording every inch of the earth. In another, God is a married couple; in a third, there are billions of Gods, one for every single thing on the planet.
Where's the one in which God is Stephen Fry, broadcasting pronouncements to his disciples via a computerised message service, who then go out and do what he says?
