A young alien scientist joins forces with other archaeologists to uncover the secrets of a race that died out many years ago.

In the near future, a young mother leaves behind a book for her daughter before she embarks on her space journey to the outer solar system in an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial creatures. Sections from her book are interspersed with her husband's verbal recollections of their love story, which he addresses to their young daughter.

A doctor plans an insurrection against the aliens that kidnapped his crew. After being taken prisoner on an alien planet, a doctor and his remaining crew devise an intricate means to escape.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

A scientist collecting samples on Titan finds the expedition to be beyond her wildest dreams—and her darkest nightmares—when she connects with disembodied alien life. Their strange communications take on new urgency when both their lives are at risk.

In a distant future of intergalactic colonies and relative diplomacy between extra-terrestrial races, two junkyard scavengers scour star systems for potential valuables. After stumbling upon a damaged robot on an abandoned planet, the pair analyse its memory core in the hopes of turning a profit, but are instead forced to challenge their notion of humanity.