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.

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?

A newscaster recently arrived in space receives ominous advice from a jaded engineer: whatever you do, leave space because getting attracted to aliens will be the death of us all.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Human detectives work to solve the mystery of who killed a human woman at an Earth-based alien embassy. They soon realize that human methods of solving mysteries come into conflict with the social customs of the aliens.

In deep space, a crew of humans and artificial intelligence deliberate on whether or not to change course so as to preserve the life of an innocent-presenting alien-being.