When an alien spaceship lands on Earth in need of help, leaders of countries around the world help and house them, causing tension between humans and these costly guests.

Extraterrestrial visitors promise solutions to America's financial, environmental, and energy problems - in exchange for the country's black citizens. A cultural struggle breaks out to determine whether the trade will be made.

When a low-budget science fiction television show successfully predicts the discovery of extraterrestrial life, its cult followers investigate its mysterious origins, only to be met with more mysteries.

Is it better to have a human civilization devoid of art and culture than to have none at all? Three Earth ambassadors must whether to annihilate a space colony that has traded away human consciousness for a hive mind that feels nothing but the need for survival. In the distant future, three humans in possession of nuclear warheads must decide whether to allow a remarkable human variant species without consciousness to dominate the galaxy or destroy them forever.

When aliens land on a planet new to them, they find a population obsessed with a virtual reality and uninterested in the intense beauty of the natural world around them.

Aliens land peacefully on Earth and promise to fix humans’ societal problems, but humans soon get so frustrated with them that they flee to other planets. The smaller Earth population ends up bringing positive change, but this emigration to other planets reveals that many other populations have fled these aliens for the same reason.

After discovering a mysterious alien artifact on the Moon, human astronauts endeavor to uncover its purpose and message from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Aboard a human city ship headed for Proxima b, shadows begin to haunt the sleeping passengers. An engineer commits suicide, and a psychotherapist finds that these apparitions feed on human guilt. The only way to survive is to master and confront the mounds of guilt that each human passenger carries inside herself.

A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

In the midst of an interplanetary war, two women meet an alien who is hoping to retrieve the body of his dead brother, whom he honors by consuming his remains.