A young being describes coming of age on their planet. Though they spend most of their time without gender, when it comes time to get physically intimate, they meet at a kemmer-house for a short duration, as either female or male.

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.

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.

One late summer, a time-traveling couple and their daughter move into a house in the countryside. Their daughter soon develops a strong bond with the girl who lives across the street, but as the time-traveling parents prepare their family to jump to a new time, the two teenage girls face the terrifying prospect of losing their treasured friendship for good.

When a man marries a princess from Cimmeria, a country he believes he imagined into existence, he must come to terms with a culture that recognizes twins as a single person—a primary and their shadow—and the lengths a shadow twin would go to in order to become their own person.

A mother and her three boys are on a small Greek island, where they prepare to reunite with her husband. Before they leave, they attend a party, and spend time reflecting on the possibility that they may never see their missing loved one again.

A young Native American man visits a burial site on a nearby island and must reflect on both his allegiance to his culture and to himself.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

A young man leaves his traditional village behind to travel and work on distant planets. Throughout his interplanetary journeys, he must constantly reevaluate his understandings of truth, tradition, and love as he seeks a fulfilling life of his own, independent of what is expected from him.

When their made-up country suddenly becomes real, three high school friends find themselves in a predicament.