Synopsis: The floating world - Japan. The history of Japan itself reads like some incredible blend of science fiction and fantasy - a first contact story which transformed on isolated island nation into a world power, a key player in business, technology, entertainment, and the world economy. But all power has its price, and for Japan that price is being paid in the ongoing struggle to maintain cultural traditions and indenity despite the exposure to all things Western. Now some of today's finest visionaries - Richard Lupoff, Pat Cadigan, Paul Levinson, Janeen Webb and Jack Dann, Patric Helman - writers equally at home in the nonfiction realm of advanced technology and the fictional realms of the future, offer five beautifully crafted novellas ranging from one artist's life on an asteroid which has become a haven for those escaping the strictures and structures of Japanese society... to a murder mystery set in a Japanese colony on Phobos... to a guest for identity in an Artificial Reality that may prove all too "real". (from the back cover of the DAW first edition)