1. Introduction: Views from the Brink -- 2. Still Point and Turning World: Second Skin and Housekeeping -- 3. Fiction by Cycles: Lives of the Poets and The Things They Carried -- 4. Magisters Ludi: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. and The Music of Chance -- 5. Fluent Mundos: Ratner's Star and Plus -- 6. The Poetics of Elsewhere: Prisoner's Dilemma and The MacGuffin -- 7. Mergence Myths: Ceremony and Middle Passage -- 8. Maximalist Stories, Minimalist Novels.