A dying man's life flashes past as science fiction stories created by his panicked brain. Trying to make sense of its imminent demise, the brain spins tales of monster flies, and time machines, and weird factories, and a library of unreachable books. As it fights to stay in the past, forever circling its final moments, the dementing organ casts itself as The Great Mind, a god-like entity at the end of time. This Sum of the Dead resets a repeatedly breaking universe, trying to put things right. The Time Aerials are its own tree-like brain cells whose fractal branches leak into time and create consciousness itself. But the brain, like all artists, leaves clues and conceits and signatures hidden in plain sight...

This is metafiction and the brain’s an unreliable narrator. Perhaps the book’s an instruction manual, maybe one of many…