Anthology of stories beginning with the protagonist checking into the suicide clinic

Question

I'm trying to remember the title of an anthology of SF stories that all started with the same premise: a few paragraphs in which the male protagonist checks into the suicide clinic, has a brief discussion with the harried technician, then settles in to wait for the end.

All the stories proceed to tell what happens from there. The initial chunk is extremely simple and feels like John Campbell-era writing. I scanned a list of Groff Conklin anthologies, as that would have been my first guess, but didn't see anything promising. And I tried to find it on my disorganized shelves with no luck; it's not clear to me if I ever owned it.

Of course none of the stories end with "and then there was nothing" or "you're in the waiting room for heaven/hell". In every case, if there is death, there's interesting life beyond it.

I probably read this in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but I feel like it wasn't new then, perhaps a paperback picked up at The Paperback Exchange.

I don't recall if the writers were well-known, entirely unknown, or a mix. It feels like an Ursula Le Guin writing workshop kind of book, but it doesn't feel like her sort of opening, and I think the stories were probably too long for that. But no authors' names stand out.

I have vague senses of three of the stories:

• In one, in one the hero's consciousness ends up in the body of some avian race, possibly in a gladiatorial contest.

• In another, while the protagonist does die, this is just a regular occurrence for this two-part being that reunites after each death (perhaps sampling various sentient species?)

• In a third, the super-competent hero somehow ends up in some urban noir landscape, enters an exclusive gaming club, wins some complex strategy game in a single move, all steps in trying to uncover the person at the center of some plot.

That's about all I remember. I don't know the editor, publisher, or any of the stories' authors. I don't know how many stories there were; although I'd guess it was something between six and ten. I can't even picture the cover. I'm sure the clinic had some innocuous "Eternal Rest" sort of name, but I don't know what it was. Almost certainly there was some explanatory text about seeing how differently authors will treat the same prompt, but I recall none of it.

Is this familiar?

Answer 1

Five Fates.

This was published in 1970 so it fits with your memory of the date you read it. The book is a collection of five novellas, each of which explores what happens when William Bailey checks into a euthanasia clinic. The introduction is:

In Poul Anderson’s THE FATAL FULFILLMENT Bailey is discovered practicing the secret device of painting, is committed to Hospital to be saved and made sane . . . but that is only the beginning.

Frank Herbert’s foray into Euthanasia in MURDER WILL IN gives Bailey the realization of the Tagas/Bacit occupying his body and the tremendous battle they must face for survival.

MAVERICK by Gordon R. Dickson is a beautiful story of a parallel world where men have wings and will die for their guilds. Bailey slips through a portal of time and in a battle for life discovers a profitable black market operation.

Utilizing some remarkable storytelling devices Harlan Ellison’s THE REGION BETWEEN stuns and dazzles as Bailey’s soul is stolen by an enigmatic, omnipotent Succubus—sending it on a series of extra-galactic journeys that culminates finally in a memorable nightmare.

Keith Laumer’s OF DEATH WHAT DREAMS is a particularly powerful story of the ultimate in gambling—Booking the Vistat Run, a game based on the nightly fluctuations of life and death among the countless millions of poor and wretched in the world.

The avian race story is Maverick, the two part being reunited is Murder Will In and the strategy game story is Death What Dreams.