All this seems weird enough to old dinosaurs like your editors who grew up in the ’50s, but where is it going to go and what’s going to happen next, in the future? Our intuition is that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

So open up this book and let some of SF’s most expert dreamers show you eleven extreme and radical games that people in the future will play. Dangerous games. Games more addictive than heroin, and just as deadly. Games that will take you completely out of this world and into fantastical and fabulous realms of your own creation, where the dangers are still as real as a knife in the dark. Games that will become the hit TV shows of the future and will boil couch potatoes everywhere in their skins. Games that affect reality itself, where your success or failure in life depends on your gaming skills. Games that will take you to Mars and to the icy darkness of the outer Solar System. Games that you can’t stop playing, even if you want to.

Dangerous games. Games to die for-quite literally.

Enjoy! The game is afoot!

THE PRIZE OF PERIL by Robert Sheckley

The late Robert Sheckley was one of science fiction’s premiere satirists and humorists, rivaled for that title only by Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams (who was himself clearly influenced by Sheckley), and he was more prolific than either of them, particularly at shorter lengths, turning out hundreds of short stories over the course of his fifty-three year career. Sheckley sold his first novel, Immortality, Inc., in 1958, and followed it up over the years with other novels such as Dimension of Miracles, Mindswap, The Status Civilization, Journey Beyond Tomorrow, Watchbird, Journey of Joenes, The 10th Victim, Hunter/Victim, Victim Prime, and Godshome.