After a woman's paleontologist fiancé is attacked by five men in a bar and hospitalized, she imagines how their lives might have gone differently—if her fiancé were a dinosaur.

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 writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

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.

An academic prides herself in her powers of observation, but finds herself unable to change the fate of those suffering around her—whether it be a microscopic rotifer in biology lab, a long-dead boy whose letters she reads from the 1800s, or her twenty-one-year old cousin.

A researcher and his assistant conduct neuropsychological experiments on dogs with the understanding that the dogs will be terminated immediately after, but the reality of their killing is much more difficult to cope with.

A Japanese primate sociologist's life falls apart in slow-motion as he struggles with research, tension in his marriage, and his declining health.

When seeds fall from the sky and cause human beings to transform into animals, two people try to understand how they met.

A man intently studies extinct mammals to escape his wife and mistress, who often vent to him about their daily worries and give him anxiety.