A group of alien archaeologists explores the Olduvai Gorge in Africa to learn about humanity, an extinct race. However, as they begin investigating artifacts, they discover that everything they knew about humans is entirely wrong.

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.

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.

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?

In the future, a field ethnologist studies and gains access to a new culture by raising her two children there and learning through them. As the children mature, the culturally ascribed gender roles make life hard for the son.

On an alien world, a colony of humans has evolved to reproduce with one mother and many fathers. After delaying for years, one young woman finally chooses three fathers for her baby, but her desire for freedom draws her into the orbit of the post-human anthropologists who have come from the stars to study this quaint biological mating ritual.

Over the course of millions of years, various species in the galaxy discover a human footprint on the surface of the moon and attempt to explain its origin and meaning.

When a scientist discovers science-based information that negates his world's established creation myth and belief system, he sends the world into chaos, with some zealots clinging desperately to their dogma, while others attempt to embrace the unknown future.

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.

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.