Gravity's Angelsis a showcase for a decade's worth of Swanwick's shorter fictions, from his first published short story, "The Feast of Saint Janis," to a descent past the edge of a flat Earth otherwise very like our own in "The Edge of the World," which won the 1990 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. The stories collected here are luminous with the promise of his ambition, smart and allusive, dense with ideas and images, sacred and profane.