A review by tasharobinson
This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death by

4.0

Even better than the last collection of stories about the idea of a Machine Of Death, which can tell you how you're going to die, but not when, or what its often opaque predictions actually mean. All the writers interpret the idea differently and make up their own worlds around this central idea, but this time out, the interpretations have a lot more range: more creativity, more playfulness, more surprises. I did a full review for The A.V. Club (not yet published), so I won't go into huge detail here, but I will say that some of these stories have really stuck with me. Particularly the one about the creative-death technician working for a supervillain, and ensuring that all the super-spies who break into the villain's island lair can be killed, even if their Machine Of Death slips predict seemingly non-violent ends. Or the one about the singer in the technofuture who makes her living by composing flattering songs about what her patron's not-very-informative death slip might mean. I'm often pretty dubious about anthologies, which usually seem to come with a lot of dross, but this one actually held me.

Full review here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/ryan-north-matthew-bennardo-david-malki-editors-th,100074/