In a future where death is volunteered and the population is controlled, a soon-to-be father waits for his triplets to be born—and he must find three volunteers to die in order for them to live.

Humanity has eliminated all plants and animals in a futuristic world that isn't meant for human consumption. One man refuses to kill his pet animals and plants, and the government tries to convince him to comply.

On an alien world, a colony of humans has evolved to reproduce with one mother and many fathers. After delaying for years, one young woman finally chooses three fathers for her baby, but her desire for freedom draws her into the orbit of the post-human anthropologists who have come from the stars to study this quaint biological mating ritual.

A woman harbors a secret desire to have a baby in a future world where childbirth is extremely rare and discouraged.

A tiny Chinese village is slated to be inundated by a flood, and the government offers resettlement checks and industrialized homes to citizens who relocate so that a dam can be built in the village’s place. A seed keeper and schoolteacher are among the last to stay behind.

Amongst problems with her ungrateful children and ex-husband, a middle-aged mother deals with a burgeoning mid-life crisis — until she realizes that she has become miraculously pregnant.

When an anthropology professor moves with his family to a remote home on the Great Plains, a new friendship with an idealist, a landscaping disaster, and a disheartening consultation with an Indigenous man shake his beliefs about cultural relativism to the core.

Throughout time and space, women struggle to gain control of their bodies.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

On the Great Plains, an aging farmer and his wife struggle to sell their produce amid an increase in frozen food manufacturing. The farmer must figure out how to avoid the fate of his neighbors, who were pushed out of business and into welfare dependence.