• "Introduction" (Robert Silverberg)
• "Life on the Artificial Heart" (Mark W. Tiedemann)
• "Automatic Death" (Cary James)
• "Waterworld, or All the Way Down" (John K. Gibbons)
• "Her Toes Were Beautiful on the Hilltops: Three Enigmas" (Brian W. Aldiss)
  • "Another Way Than Death"
  • "That Particular Green of Obsequies"
  • "The Ancestral Home of Thought"
• "The Cool Equations" (Deborah Wessell)
• "The Fire the Fire" (Alex Jeffers)
• "The Sum of All Potentials" (John M. Landsberg)
• "Most Politely, Most Politely" (Barry N. Malzberg)
• "Souls in the Great Machine" (Sean McMullen)
• "Lost in Transmission" (Tony Daniel)
• "Job Security" (Joe W. Haldeman)
• "The Passing of the Eclipse" (Donna Farley)
• "Forty at the Kiosk" (Nicholas A. DiChario)
• "By the Mirror of My Youth" (Kathe Koja)
• "Memories of Muriel" (Paula May)
• "Waiting for the Rain" (Dirk Strasser)
• "Program's Progress" (Jonathan Lethem)
• "The Shining Place" (Jamil Nasir)
• "Triad" (Lisa Mason)
• "(from) The Bridge" (Alex Jeffers)
• "Burning Bush" (Carolyn Gilman)
• "Metal Teeth" (Lou Fisher)

Kirkus Reviews rates the anthology "[a]bout average overall, with new ideas few and far between and a stale writers'-workshop air hanging over much of the proceedings." Singled out as "[s]ome of the more intriguing entries" are "a murder mystery set aboard a Mars shuttle (Cary James); an alien contact/transcendence tale (Carolyn Gilman); absorbing xenology from Paula May; three more peculiar yet stimulating enigmas, courtesy of the redoubtable Brian W. Aldiss; and a witty parody of Tom Godwin's famous story, "The Cold Equations" (Deborah Wessel)."^[2]

The anthology placed fourth in the 1993 Locus Poll Award for Best Anthology.