But! Editor David Malki is also Kickstarting a card game based on the same concept, and since it’s blown its funding goal by over 1000%, they’re releasing a few stories from the anthology to say thanks.

One of them is mine! You can read it now! Here it is!

It’s about a supervillain’s henchman tasked with the job of having their enemies killed in a way that doesn’t contradict their predicted deaths. It is called: LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE!

If you can’t read it, go here.

Until it came out.

It’s flattering to be in such wonderful company, of course, but I can’t help wincing at the way EXPLODED painstakingly re-explains the concept, and details the creation of the machine as if you’ve never heard of such a thing.

Explaining yourself clearly is the first thing you learn in games writing, but it totally backfired for me in this context. And I hadn’t thought about how heavy a collection of stories about people who know how they’ll die could be. EXPLODED has jokes, but it dwells on its deaths.

One of my favourites in the collection is TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS, because it’s such a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t explain the concept, and it doesn’t even really have a plot, but it’s so funny, breezy and fun that you don’t want it to end.

The third demoralising thing I realised reading Machine of Death was that I suddenly had a much, much better idea for a story on this concept.

The crux of so many stories comes down to that Can’t Beat The Machine rule, and I got thinking about what would happen if you started from that. If the characters in your story had all read this whole collection, and were intimately familiar with the weird ways fate would bend itself to make the machine’s predictions come true. And then you tried to write an action film.

That’s when Machine of Death 2 was announced, and it wasn’t a hard decision to enter. Writing EXPLODED was a quick and enormously fun process, a handful of evenings, something I’d do again without any hope of inclusion.

So I wrote out the story idea I’d been kicking around, looked at it, and ditched it.

The problem was that it was about heroes – soldiers, really, but soldiers about whom I could only ever say one of a few things:

• YAY hero soldiers!
• WAIT some soldiers are jerks!
• GUYS war can be bad sometimes.
• OOH maybe what they’re fighting for is CONTROVERSIAL?

These are the four worst story concepts ever. And they don’t exactly lend themselves to the light, breezy tone I wanted to steal from DEVOURED.

The truth is, I don’t give a shit about fictional soldiers. I’ve watched them, been them, killed them more times than makes sense. I just liked the concept of how these guys would work in a Machine of Death world, how they would use that to their advantage, and wanted to write a story where things worked like that.

Really, the only interesting thing I could ask about some Machine of Death-enhanced superheroes was “What would it be like to fight them?” It would fucking suck. It would be like fighting the player in a videogame, or the hero in a movie – the asshole all the bullets miss, for whom every twist of physics seems to land in his favour.

What’s that like? Ask a supervillain. Actually, ask his henchmen.

LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE is about three henchpersons, the supervillain they work for, and the supersoldier superheroes who keep fucking up their shit.

It got accepted into the Machine of Death 2 collection on my birthday, and I danced around the room like an imbecile.

The stories from the Machine of Death collection are being gradually released as a free podcast, a sort of episodic audiobook. Mine just came out, read rather excellently by Christopher Joseph. Warning! Strong language from the first word.

Not totally sure why I don’t get a mention, I think that might be an oversight. The site makes it clear enough who wrote it so it’s no big deal.

One of many reasons I declined to read my own story was that my narrator is American and I am not, so it’s great to hear it in its pseudo-native tongue. The flipside, of course, is that I’m not perfect at expressing the exact tone of voice characters are using, so inevitably there are parts that aren’t as I’d imagined them. I don’t mind that at all – my narrator is intentionally not me in some important ways, so it’s kind of nice to hear him say things the way I wouldn’t.

It also makes me realise how much clearer I need to be about who’s speaking. Chris always gets it right, but without doing some kind of comedy accent for one of the characters, that’s not enough for the listener to always know. I think I’m meant to write scripts rather than prose, I don’t really care how non-dialogue information is communicated so long as it’s clear.

Here’s the direct MP3 link if you want to download it, or the RSS link to subscribe.

The book is now $12 from Amazon.com or £11 from Amazon.co.uk. You can also get it as an iBook for $5.99 or on the Kindle for £7.29.

The whole thing is also free in PDF form, and the text of my story for it is online here.

I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it.

It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true.

That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

A lab assistant charged with one of the first machines of death refuses to test himself, while everyone around him succumbs.

Pure pleasure to read – or in my case, listen to. It’s the longest story so far, but every time reader Kevin McShane (who sounds excitingly like Peter from Fringe) pauses for more than a second, you’re hoping it’s not going to end.

The whole story is a log, that rapidly devolves into a journal, written in a friendly and clear-headed style. The watch-word of this collection has been ‘refreshing’, and what’s refreshing about Chernega’s protagonist is his almost complete lack of curiosity. He’s curious about other people’s predictions, but he’s one of the few characters in the book so far not even tempted by the prospect.

His diary charts the escalating public reaction to the machines, covering some of the same territory as my own, and I’m honoured they didn’t just scrap mine when they read this. ALMOND plays much more with the machine’s enjoyably sinister ambiguity – when it starts giving more than a few people GOVERNMENT, you know something interesting’s about to go down.

Some predictions are clever enigmas that are unraveled during the story, others are unexplained and seemingly unexplainable, and others seem to be openly fucking with you. That’s important, because the tension the story builds hinges on the narrator inferring a personality to the machine – one that becomes increasingly infuriating to him.

It has a punch, but doesn’t conform to the usual twist-story structure: the set up is almost immediately before the payoff, which prevents it from risking anticlimax. The voice, humour and escalating intrigue don’t need a giant question mark hanging over them to keep the story compelling throughout.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

An insurance salesman’s prediction turns his life around.

Refreshingly unmopey, nonjudgmental and un-non-funny. This is an exploration of the positive impact a prediction could have: not by implying a long and happy life, but by implying a death so exotic you have to assume things are going to get more interesting from here.

That’s really all there is to it, but it’s witty, fun, breezy and explores its concept with an infectious curiosity. The author is clearly a funny guy with a great writing voice, and he lets a little of it seep into every character. In a short story, that doesn’t hurt.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

You’re a doctor, and six unconscious patients come in with a mysterious condition. Their Machine of Death predictions all read: TESTS. What do you do?

A great story, and a great premise. All the stories hinge on the machine in some way, but it’s the sign of a great one when it feels like it’d be worth making up the machine just to tell it.

It’s also cool to have a story that’s serious and urgent, rather than chin-strokey. From 800 submissions that must have been tediously similar at times, you can see why a medical drama would stand out to Malki and co.

If I had to criticise, I’d say the thing with the security guard, which I won’t spoil, felt jammed in for character development. Not enough room in a short story to make it feel natural. And like any story that ends on a question, it’d be better if it didn’t.

Neither bothered me much, and I’m expecting this to remain one of my favourites.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

The second story in the collection to take its title from a confectionary-related death that turns out to be irrelevant to the main characters. And like Flaming Marshmallow, that put me off it for a while.

Fudge is not quite a twist story, but the whole thing does lead up to a prediction, and the nature of the prediction is what gives it its punch. It doesn’t count as a twist because we don’t really find out what it means, only how it affects the protagonist. And then, Fudge ends.

That’s the other thing you can do with a short story – end on a note that is not so much “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue” as “Hmmm.” It’s good, and well-read by author Kit Yona in the podcast version, but personally I quite like to be all “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue.”

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

The book I’m reading just got putdownable, so I’ve finally dug into Machine of Death. I’d also been following the podcast, trying each entry to see if I like the reader’s voice, and saving it to read in the book if I don’t. What? That’s not weird. I’m overly fussy about reading voices.

My plan is to review every story in the book except my own. We’ve had lots of lovely reviews, but in a normal review you don’t analyse every story – most don’t even mention standouts. But short story collections are diverse, if they’re good, and for all I know ours is both. I don’t know any of the other authors personally, except for brief e-mail exchanges about the book, so it’s not hard to be objective. I will be more polite than I am in game reviews, though, since I can’t claim to be well-read or good at analysing literature.

A school girl frets about what social clique her prediction will put her in.

I have to admit I avoided this story at first, because the title made me think “Sigh, comedy death.” It’s not a comedy, and that prediction has almost nothing to do with it.

Instead, it’s an incredibly focused picture of what feels like a very thoroughly imagined version of the Machine of Death world, set long after any initial shock or uncertainty about the use of the machine. Everyone’s so settled into it that schoolkids define their hang-out groups and social status by their predicted deaths; violent ones the coolest.

Something rings very true about the ease with which kids accept the morbidity of death predictions, and get more excited about the possibilities than bogged down by the fatalism. The story’s payload, to me at least, is a situation where a girl is desperately hoping for the stickiest possible end, while her father longs for something dull and distant.

She does get her prediction, but the only failing of Marshmallow is that it isn’t immediately clear what it means. That ambiguity’s a useful tool in other stories, but here I’m just not totally sure if the words are referring to something I’m not familiar with. The characters understand it, and we understand it through them, but the scene could have had more punch if it was something we could immediately grasp the implications of, to both parties.

This feels like one of the most convincing worlds, though, and the voice of the narrator is authentically young and fun.

Machine of Death: a thing that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

At about 7.30PM yesterday evening UK time, we finally pulled ahead of Keith Richards and became the #1 best-selling book on Amazon.com. Then we stayed there for twenty four hours. Sales were up 685,800%. We beat Glenn Beck’s new book on its launch day.

Apparently: “It was mentioned as number one on the Glenn Beck radio program this morning as an example of America’s preoccupation with death.” It was “a plea to his listeners to buy his book and not let us death-peddlers win.”

Thank you so, so much to anyone who bought it, and thanks to anyone who told other people about it. Not many people actually read the Machine of Death blog on a regular basis – not much has happened there for three years. So all this happened by people telling other people.

When the editors suggested a big push on the 26th, I thought it’d be cool, but we’d be gaming the system a bit. But really, we were just giving ourselves a launch day. We didn’t know when it would go up on Amazon.com, so we had to wait until it had before we could start organising any kind of campaign. Other books get to dictate a release date and plan around that – we did the same, we just had to rely on a little good will from people to delay until a launch day we could organise for.

Malki now has e-mails from four bookstores interested in stocking it, including Barnes & Noble, and one from the New York friggin Times. He and Ryan did a funny sort of mini-podcast to say thanks and stretch more sports metaphors.

A lot of people are asking how many copies we actually sold – I don’t have any insider info on that, but if Amazon’s percentage increase figures are right- wait, they’re not. See comments.

There’s lots more info on the PDF, audiobook, Kindle and Vulcan mindmeld editions on the official site, which’ll also have more info on if and when it’ll come to Amazon.co.uk and the like.

Thanks again everyone, particularly those in the UK who braved the shipping costs to support it. You have accomplished something amazing, annoyed Glenn Beck, and made me and a bunch of webcomic dudes very happy.

What is it?

A collection of short stories all based around the idea of a machine that can tell you how you will die. The book contains 34 stories by 33 different writers, and 35 illustrations by 35 different artists. My story is about the accidental inventors of the machine, and is illustrated by Jesse Reklaw of Slow Wave, a great comic incorporating reader-submitted dreams.

Headliners include Randall Munroe (XKCD), Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), John Allison (Scary Go Round), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), Aaron Diaz (Dresden Codak), Dorothy Gambell (Cat And Girl), and Christopher Hastings (Dr McNinja). Here’s the full contents of stories and illustrators:

What’s the best way to get it?

1. Buy it on Amazon.com now. This is the best way to support the book, and the only place it’s currently available. It’s $17 in the US, or £11 plus £7 postage if you’re in the UK.

Sorry it’s a bit pricier than we’re used to in the UK – North America just generally charges more for books, and you could go for the cheapest postage option but it takes 18-32 business days. I’m not sure we have that many left on this Earth. You do get a lot of stories by cool people who aren’t me, though.

No progress yet on getting it into the UK Amazon or anywhere outside the US and Canada, so that won’t happen in the foreseeable future I’m afraid. That’s why we want to get a chart position on Amazon.com we can brag about.

If you know me in real life and live in Bath, let me know today if you want to buy a copy: it may make sense to order together this afternoon to save a little on postage.

2. From early November, I’ll be able to buy some copies wholesale and have them sent to people. This will not be significantly cheaper – about £15 with postage. But once that warehouse has them in, it’ll be quicker to send from there than from Amazon. Since that option is at least a week off, right now it’s not quicker to wait for this than to buy from Amazon, and it doesn’t support the project, so I don’t recommend it.

3. It will eventually be available as a free PDF. You won’t get the handsome physical object, but you will get to read the stories.

4. They’re working on a Kindle version too, which won’t be free. It’s not ready yet, but if you’d like to support day one sales, you can just buy the actual book on Amazon today, and forward the editors your receipt e-mail for a free Kindle version once it’s out.

5. Finally, we’ll be releasing a free audiobook of Machine of Death episodically – one story at a time as an ongoing podcast.

“Our (free) audiobook will include the voice talents of many of the authors, plus Jesse Thorn, MC Frontalot, Zach Weiner, Lore Sjöberg, Dave Kellett, Kris Straub, Colleen AF Venable, Joel Watson, and one other secret person we’re waiting to confirm. Yahtzee Croshaw reads his own story.”

If you’d prefer one of the free methods but still want to support the project, you can still buy it on Amazon to support day-one sales, and have it shipped to Machine of Death headquarters to save on postage. Your copy will be donated to schools, libraries or showing the book off to people – equally worthy causes.

Wondermark Enterprises
Attn: MOD
2554 Lincoln Blvd #214
Venice, CA 90291

I demand a free sample

Of course. Here are the first 40 pages as a PDF:

My story is still online for free. And here is the story HIV INFECTION FROM MACHINE OF DEATH NEEDLE, by Brian Quinlan, in its entirety:

I have now bought the book

Woo! Thanks! I’m actually pretty optimistic about our day one sales. I don’t get any money from the book doing well, but all proceeds go towards promoting it further, and I’d love to see it be more widely available. If you do get it, let me know in the comments. I imagine we’ll get some idea of how well it sells in general, but I’d love to hear if any came from here. I also want to say “Thanks!” a lot.

I can’t wait to read it myself – I’ve only read my own story and the one above, so I’ll be using some (most) of my contributor’s fee to buy a copy today. Randall Munroe’s – called ? – is about “what happens when physical science rejects the idea of precognition”. I am excited about this.

It would be awesome if you could spread around this link, that date, and click Attend on Facebook so we can see how many people are planning to buy. I’ll post again on the day to remind people and say ‘Woo!’ again. Thanks!

• Randall XKCD Munroe
• Ben Zero Punctuation Croshaw (who I just interviewed)
• Ryan Dinosaur Comics North
• Tom Who’s Writing This Francis

Illustrated by people including:

• John Scary Go Round Allison
• Kate Hark! A Vagrant Beaton
• Aaron Dresden Codak Diaz
• Dorothy Cat And Girl Gambell
• Christopher Dr McNinja Hastings

I have no idea who’s illustrating mine yet, but you can’t really lose with this list. The final lineup very charitably calls my story ‘brutal, desperate and real’, so it’d be kind of hilarious to see Kate Beaton do it.

I have a flight to catch and a lot to do before and on it, so hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Here’s my story, and here’s the comic that inspired the collection. Oh yeah, and here’s the awesome cover:

One of these is about paramedics in the future. One’s about a magician. There are stories about class, revolution, family, the third world, and one that’s just a series of personal ads. And one, inexplicably, is mine. They told me two or three days after I was entirely sure it had been rejected, which I can now confirm is the best way to win something.

The editors – Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, David Malki of Wondermark and Matthew Bennardo of the world – had planned to self-publish the collection, but have apparently had some interest from actual publishing houses since. So I imagine they’re going to shop the manuscript around for a while and see if someone who could get it out to more than just Amazon.com will snap it up.

Either way the text will be free online, and eventually as an audiobook – sorry, podiobook (spit!). On my contract I waived the right to insist on reading it myself, because I couldn’t decide whether it would be more exciting to be on an audiobook in person, or to have someone good reading my thing. Instead I’m going to audition to read my own, and let them decide. If my voice really is as grave and dull as it sounds to me, hopefully they’ll tell me so and get someone else to do it. I’ve shot myself resoundingly in the foot, of course, by implying my narrator is North American.

What I didn’t know until that announcement post was that all three editors of the collection are including a story of their own. Since Ryan North basically invented a new grammatical logic for the English language in Dinosaur Comics, this is rather exciting. Inevitably his story has the best title of the lot – MURDER AND SUICIDE, RESPECTIVELY – and an immediately enticing concept: two scientists realize that the Machine may allow them to send messages backwards through time.

These three are in addition to the 29 chosen submissions, from 681 entries, so the final book with be 32 stories of something like 4,000 words each. Mine is one of the longer ones, at 6,600, and earned me the king’s ransom of $45, so I’ll be quitting my day job shortly and vacationing on the moon.

That fee is only for the First English Anthology rights, so I can still keep it online here, and will do so until the book itself is out and the whole text of that is online – when I’ll probably link to that instead. I’m imagining it’ll be something like a year before that actually happens, which sucks because I badly want to read almost all of these.

My first thought was that it had broken. I was going to spend a lot of time, over the next five years, wishing that I’d been right about that.

He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster. He nearly fell over trying to stop. I didn’t say anything, just stared.
“391! He was on the train this morning! He was one of the victims!” He stared too. We just stared. “Look it up!”
I didn’t have to. I didn’t have all our test cases memorised yet, but 391 I did know: EXPLODED. He was one of the reasons I didn’t believe it was working, EXPLODED was a joke. He saw I wasn’t looking it up, saw me looking at him, and knew I knew, but said it all the same:
“It fucking works.”

–

We were eating.
“Okay, well, it’s on now.” I munched a chip.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s on.” I pointed a chip at him for emphasis.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just-“
“I get that it is on.”
“Okay.” I put my chips down.
I fixed myself a drink.

–

He came into my office again, calmly this time, through the fucked door. My office, his house. We left all the doors open that afternoon, and just walked around doing small, unimportant things, occasionally meeting in the corridors of his big, dusty old house and swapping new thoughts.

“What’s the latest count? How many others died?”
“They’re saying two-hundred now.” I told him, underplaying it a little. “Some places are saying three.” They were all saying three.
“Christ. From one bomb?”
“Well, it was on the subway, so…”
“Yeah. Christ.” He slouched against the wall and looked up at the cracked ceiling. “This isn’t quite how I imagined it working.”
“You know we still have to publish, right? I mean, that was the point of no return, right there.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just-” He looked at me. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting off of this.”
I laughed, then met his eyes. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting from it? Pete, it’s going to look like we did it. You don’t seem to realise how sceptical people are going to be about something like this. You’re the only person in the world who has any idea how this box works, and to the rest of us it looks a hell of a lot like a hoax. And when some small-minded prick with a pound of C4 decided commuters were responsible for all the world’s problems this morning, it became the most vicious hoax in history. We’re going to have protesters on your lawn around the clock, we’re going to get ripped to shreds in the press, we’re going to be hounded by cameras. We’re going to get mail bombs, Pete.” I sat down, and lowered my voice. “They’re gonna try and kill us. Nobody knows yet, but I promise you that at some point in the next eighteen hours, someone, somewhere, is going to check our predictions list against the victims list and our lives as they stand will be over.” I was realising most of this as I said it. I felt sick. We were fucked.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
“We’re not fucked.” I thought about it. We were definitely fucked. “No, we’re not fucked.”
He shook his head. “We’re so fucked.”
I sighed. We were so, so fucked.

This is the first few chunks of my short story for the Machine of Death challenge, which was great fun to write. I gave it a go because I thought it would be a good test of whether I can enjoy writing to someone else’s spec, and it turns out I much prefer it to writing my own ideas. There was something breezy about this whole process – it’s a short piece to begin with, but also not having the burden of responsibility for the concept makes it even easier to jump in.

Update: My story got in!

Update: The collection is out!

Update: We’re the best selling book on Amazon!

Update: Now my story is a podcast!

Update: They’re doing another collection!

Update: I wrote a story for it!

Update: It also got in!

Update: These updates make it seem like things happened quickly but actually it took 5 years.