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.

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.

Assuming that they were here to invade, mankind massacred the aliens whose ships landed on Earth. Now, the aliens and humans have an uneasy peace together. The aliens who landed on earth love to fly kites. One kite-maker sells them despite harassment from skinheads who hate the aliens and anyone who does business with them.

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.

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?

When an ambiguous small US town must welcome recently-landed aliens into the mix, the townspeople experience a range of emotions: sexual attraction, curiosity, disgust, sympathy, ambivalence.

When a far-away planet requests the return of two fugitive queer extraterrestrials, a closeted man finds the empathy necessary to enable their escape.

A soldier who is part of an intergalactic missionary battles her own disbelief and the arrival of rebel forces.

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.

In a future Los Angeles burdened by overpopulation, a twelve-year-old boy hires an alien assassin to kill the man forcing an abortion on his mother.