"I took it with equanimity, however: I've long known that fortune's a whore and life itself a kind of stupid muddle. I am not a religious man. Far from it. I hold, if anything, a belief which I believe was once ascribed to the Gnostic: that Satan won out over God, not the other way around, and the Dark Prince runs things in the dismal and disastrous way that suits his nature. I knew that everything was just chance and bad luck, in a universe in which things were stacked against us and even our ruling deity hated us."
—Robert Sheckley, "The Eryx"
Great little anthology, Walter Jon Williams' "Lethe" in particular hits a Zelazny note (not the first time; his Ace Double "Elegy for Angels and Dogs" sequel to Zelazny's "The Graveyard Heart" is fantastic), "The Eryx" is the kind of wiseass story Sheckley told in all his work, with a little Zelazny mysticism. Some of these are more poetic fantasy than I'm really into, but that was also Zelazny's thing.
- Lethe, by Walter Jon Williams
- The Story Roger Never Told, by Jack Williamson
- The Somehow Not Yet Dead, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
- Calling Pittsburgh, by Steven Brust
- If I Take the Wings of Morning, by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
- Ki'rin and the Blue and White Tiger, by Jane M. Lindskold
- The Eryx, by Robert Sheckley
- Southern Discomfort, by Jack C. Haldeman II
- Suicide Kings, by John J. Miller
- Changing of the Guard, by Robert Wayne McCoy and Thomas F. Monteleone
- The Flying Dutchman, by John Varley
- Ninekiller and the Neterw, by William Sanders
- Call Me Titan, by Robert Silverberg
- The Outling, by Andre Norton
- Arroyo De Oro, by Pati Nagle
- Back in "The Real World", by Bradley H. Sinor
- Mad Jack, by Jennifer Roberson
- Movers and Shakers, by Paul Dellinger
- The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness, by William Browning Spencer
- Only the End of the World Again, by Neil Gaiman
- Slow Symphonies of Mass and Time, by Gregory Benford
- Asgard Unlimited, by Michael A. Stackpole
- Wherefore the Rest Is Silence, by Gerald Hausman