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.

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 linguist is called to investigate robots that seem to have created their own language.

A Los Angeles speech pathologist is assigned to the case of a presumably mentally-ill woman who speaks in gibberish that turns out to be Old English. When the woman disappears, deciphering her mysterious writing leads the pathologist to wonder if she has stumbled across a time traveler.

Online, space ship storytellers discuss why they tell stories for a living—and how to do it right.

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.

When a talented linguist makes contact with the Martian species and is invited into their inner circle, he uncovers a culturally rich civilization in danger of going extinct.

A brief but ill-fated spark flares between an earth-roaming Spacer and a local frelk.

In the near future, two men—a quiet, rule-following biologist and a swashbuckling engineer—are tasked with a decades-long mission to colonize a planet outside the Solar System. But in the spaceship’s close quarters, tensions bubble up until one man decides he is going to kill the other.

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?