Las Vegas has long been considered the American icon of excess. It offers every imaginable extreme of greed, pleasure, and despair, all supported by technology that enhances fantasy and allows residents and visitors alike to forget reality and their human responsibilities. The fourteen stories in Dead Neon imagine Sin City in the near future, when overindulgence has led to social, environmental, or economic collapse, and technology can no longer reverse decay or chaos. The settings vary from futuristic casinos to the seared postapocalyptic desert, and the subjects vary from the struggle to survive in a repressive theocracy to the madness of living in a world where most life forms and all moral codes have vanished. The authors, all either Vegas-based or intimately familiar with the city, capture its unique rhythms and flavor and probe its potential for evoking the fullest expression of the human spirit in settings of magic, horror, and transcendence. Book jacket.