Two extraterrestrial beings land on Earth in search of information and struggle to adapt.

All across the contemporary world, space whales are falling from the sky. They seem to be trying to deliver a message to the Earth — but as an American grassroots movement attempts to communicate with these creatures, it will face challenges from the government as well as the possible dangers of interacting with these interstellar beings.

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.

After alien spaceships appear all over the world, a commercial driver gets a contract from the aliens to drive one of them around the United States. A commercial driver gets a contract to drive an alien around the United States. She soon learns that the alien is not conscious, but has been using humans as hosts to understand subjective experience.

A grieving mother and accomplished linguist relives her child's lost life as she learns to communicate with the aliens that have landed on earth.

A modern Puerto Rican parrot meditates on why humans seek intelligence in other corners of the universe while they neglect the refined communicative capacities of their neighboring parrots.

The asteroid work crews don't have much to do but tell tall tales to each other. One man tells a particularly riveting account of an expedition where he met a strange parasitic species that inhabits human bodies and barely escaped unscathed—or did he?

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.

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.

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.