It includes 13 of his earlier works, along with an introduction by Harlan Ellison in which the latter relates how he "discovered" Dan Simmons at the Colorado Mountain College's "Writers' Conference in the Rockies" in 1981.

"The River Styx Runs Upstream" was Dan Simmons's first published work, and the short story that brought him to Ellison's attention in August 1979.

Stricken by grief, the father bargains (heedless of the prospect of financial ruin) with the "Resurrectionists" to have his wife's corpse technologically revived.

Their family is stigmatized, and the father slowly breaks down and his classes become less and less popular until he takes a sabbatical to write his long-planned work on the Cantos.

It was inspired by his 1969 experiences in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when he worked with children with physical and mental disabilities, as a teacher's aide in the Upsal Day School for the Blind.

Unfortunately, the strain of holding Bremen and Gail in his mind and in comprehending what the show up pushes Robby's obese body to the brink and over.

The events concern a day when a major and unscrupulous televangelist (Brother Freddy) sees a scheduled appearance by Dale Evans go seriously wrong when an exotic Italian-looking fellow strolls on stage.

He announces that he is Vanni Fucci (a character from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy) and that "for the last seven hundred years I have lived in hell."

By this point, it is clear that a supernatural force is at work: Security is being prevented from getting onto the stage by an invisible and extremely resilient wall, and the cameras are physically disassembled but are still transmitting over the air.

From Fucci's perspective, the torments of Hell are quite bad enough, but the colossal and cosmic injustice of being condemned to Hell for his politics aggravates him sufficiently that he "gives God the fig"; to punish Fucci for his blasphemy, every thief "within a hundred yards" becomes "Chelidrids, jaculi, phareans, cenchriads" and "two-headed amphisbands" (pg 80), who then attack him and rend him limb from limb in a painful orgy of violence.

Recently, Hell's management has added big-screen TVs which broadcast "Brother Freddy's Hallelujah Breakfast Club" eight times a day.

"Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle" (besides being an allusion to William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming") is a short story which deals with televangelism after an apocalypse.

Simmons mentions in the introduction that he was commissioned to write a Christmas tale that included an "overlooked present", but that he was given free rein otherwise: one of the authors was assigned the upbeat and happy story, so the other three could be as unrelievedly grim and dark as amused them.

It is set in a flooded post-apocalyptic New York City, to which televangelists have dispatched missionaries equipped with Satellite TV reception units to convert the heathens.

Prompted by the Holy Spirit, Jimmy-Joe takes a survival knife that appeared as an extra present as a gift.

He tells the children that "Anyone upon the roof tonight would see [the pagan and hence evil, from his perspective] Santa Claus and his reindeer."

It concerns a Vietnam War veteran who returns to Vietnam and after visiting a theme park recreating the war, goes berserk and escapes into the jungle with his grandchildren, killing his pursuers with a weapon he stole from a South Vietnamese who had returned to take revenge of the Korean government for betraying all that he and his comrades had fought for.

About to bury the Captain, Iverson orders Sheads to kill the scout as well, to silence all witnesses, when the very earth begins moving and opening up.

The frame story concerns the friendship between a literary-inclined teacher (based on Simmons himself) and a poor boy named Terry, whom he teaches.

Many elements and similarities survived into the later stories (from the name of the centaur Raul, to the concepts of farcasters and the WorldWeb, to the Shrike or the levitation barge or the Sea of Grass).

There are shared elements with other stories in this volume: the neo-cat Gernisavien appears as a regular cat in "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams".

Mr. Kennan apparently entered a master's degree program in Missouri, but on completing it found himself too poor to move back to the Northeast, and so is forced to take a job there teaching for a year.

In the story, Raul and Gernisavien have discovered in the "Man Ruins", a map to the location of the long-forgotten farcaster portal.

Kennan plans the grand finale to coincide with the end of the school year; Raul will sacrifice himself in glorious combat with the Wizards while his friends frantically reactivate the farcaster.

But Kennan unexpectedly lands an excellent position in the East at a college, but the exigencies of the situation are such that he must cut short the school year and leave almost immediately.

But the tale he tells during the final recess is different from the one Kennan outlined in his letter: Raul successfully breaks into the Wizard fortress, but half-frozen and overwhelmed by their technology, cannot overcome them.

Raul is safely away when it happens, but he knows that the explosion means that the quest is dead, for his friends perished with the key and knowledge necessary to reactivate the farcaster.

The title is a reference to how long it would take the plane to fall to the ocean far below and to how much time's worth of oxygen was expended of the breath-packs found in the wreckage of the Challenger.