"A major new talent. . .one of the strongest debuts in recent science-fiction history, " wrote Lucuis Shepard not long ago about emergent superstar Mary Rosenblum. And just as Shepard himself was the most powerful new short-story writer of the previous decade, so has Ms. Rosenblum come forth as a compelling voice in the 1990s in a sequence of nouvelles, set primarily within the near-future West Coast, exploring the persistence of humanity amid a nightmarish landscape of desiccated ecologies, disintegrating societies, and bewildering techniques: "Water Bringer, " "Entrada, " "The Centaur Garden, " "Second Chance, " "Synthesis, " "Flood Tide, " "The Rain Stone, " and "Stairway."