I have been a fan of Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North for a few years now. Earlier this morning I saw the blurb for the new anthology Machines of Death on his page. The anthology is based on an idea T-Rex had a few years ago for a book about a machine that would tell you how you were going to die.
“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 sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.” MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die.”
Featuring stories by: Randall Munroe * Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw * Tom Francis * Camille Alexa * Erin McKean * James L. Sutter * and many others. Featuring illustrations by: Kate Beaton * Kazu Kibuishi * Aaron Diaz * Jeffrey Brown * Scott C. * Roger Langridge * Karl Kerschl * Cameron Stewart * and many others.
Machine of Death is for sale on Amazon.com (as I write this the book is number one on Amazon’s best seller list – score one for internet based publishing) You can preview artwork and read four stories from the book in PDF here.
If you need a kindle version just follow the instructions on the Machine of Death website. Since the hard copy book won’t ship for a few days and the first four stories were very good, I am (impatiently) waiting to see if they have an eBook version for Kahuna’s (okay for my) iPhone and I’ll update the post once I find out.
– Kit