I remember reading it while in middle school in English in the United States, so the latest it would have come out was 1998. I don't remember if it was all one author, or even the same universe. These are the stories I remember:
- A man finds a way to create a medicine that prevents radiation poisoning (or possibly makes someone fireproof... it's a little confused in my head) and learns that part of the problem is finding a market for it. I vividly remember the inventor telling someone to not "let the doorknob ream you" as it slams shut.
- A bout of graffiti artists leads to the city buying anti-graffiti paint that dissolves any other paint put on top of it. After learning the futility of trying to paint over it, the protagonist consults with a friend and learns that the anti-graffiti paint will eat away at the paint above it at a steady rate, and will even eat successive layers of the anti-graffiti paint. he uses this property to engineer an animation involving a harlequin thumbing this nose at the officials even as they try to wash it away.
- Some guys (I want to say a gang) go to a clinic for an illegal nanotech transformation. The viewpoint character gets turned into a woman while a friend gets turned into a dog. After roaming about in their new forms, they return to find the clinic being raided, meaning there's no one to turn them back. I think I remember something bad happening to the one transformed into a dog where the transformation continued, erasing his human thought patterns. There was also a scene where the viewpoint character submitted to being sexually assaulted by his former friends as if it was simply to be expected given his form.
I don't remember if the first or the second story was the actual first story of the collection... I want to say that those are the order that they showed up as in the book.
