From the back of the book: This quartet of adventures explores and explodes the concept of selfhood on Al Amarja. Characters in Greg Stolze's "The Hive" subordinate themselves to an insect group mind; in "The Bliss of Death," by Robin D. Laws, divine rapture threatens to obliterate the identity of the island and everyone on it. Robin's other adventure featured in this collection, "The Doppelganger Plague," shows method acting taken to an outrageous extreme. Finally, Jonathan Tweet's "Deep Troubles" studies an Al Amarjan subculture in which people change personalities more often than clothes.