In Harlan Ellison's classic "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes," a haunted slot machine lures a busted gambler into the ultimate sucker's bet in the Las Vegas version of hell on earth. Thomas M. Disch's "Descending" brilliantly transforms the simple act of using a department-store escalator into an experience of nightmarish terror. Two very different but equally powerful stories, Greg Egan's "Scatter My Ashes" and Pat Cadigan's "Patterns," explore the complex and disturbing interrelationship between violence and the media. In "This Life and Later Ones," George Zebrowski exposes the horrors we may experience if we transcend death through computer download of our consciousness. And John Shirley's "Screens" takes the greenhouse effect and toxic pollution to a dreadful extreme. --Cynthia Ward