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.

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.

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?

The first man to walk on Mars recounts a trip with a strange alien companion across the planet to his disbelieving crew.

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.

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 group of alien archaeologists explores the Olduvai Gorge in Africa to learn about humanity, an extinct race. However, as they begin investigating artifacts, they discover that everything they knew about humans is entirely wrong.

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.

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

In deep space, a crew of humans and artificial intelligence deliberate on whether or not to change course so as to preserve the life of an innocent-presenting alien-being.