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I found this to be a frustrating read because every story featured ridiculous metaphysical stuff that can't possibly be made consistent or interesting. The entire notion of afterlife is intellectually flawed from the get go, so I feel that the author has made a mistake in the very premise of the book. A more interesting book would be something like "forty tales of how we got here", where he could describe possible ways we got here to the present moment without needing any mention of afterlife. Some of them could be metaphysical mambo jambo involving god(s) of various forms, shapes, sizes and colors (and afterlife, possibly) but a larger portion could be about more plausible scientifically-consistent possibilities, more along lines of abiogenesis and similar. I was going to rate it a 1/5 but two stories I thought contained semi-interesting ideas were "Microbe" and "Reversal". 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
2012-11-04 on goodreads.com