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.

After alien spaceships appear all over the world, a commercial driver gets a contract from the aliens to drive one of them around the United States. A commercial driver gets a contract to drive an alien around the United States. She soon learns that the alien is not conscious, but has been using humans as hosts to understand subjective experience.

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.

Human detectives work to solve the mystery of who killed a human woman at an Earth-based alien embassy. They soon realize that human methods of solving mysteries come into conflict with the social customs of the aliens.

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.

A benign alien invasion has befallen small town Ohio in the '50s. When one young girl grows tired of her angry father and abusive boyfriends, she chooses to move to the alien side of town, instead, and changes the fate of the town forever.

Two extraterrestrial beings land on Earth in search of information and struggle to adapt.

Can a husband tell that the creature in his bed is actually an alien Mushroom Queen and that his real wife is now a fungus-like entity spreading her mycelium across the states trying to get home? Probably not, but the family dog can. One minute she's dreaming about escaping from her loveless marriage, and the next, she's thrown underground by her mushroom doppelgänger, who is now sleeping with her husband. Can a husband detect that his wife has been replaced by the queen of mushrooms? Probably not, but her clever dog can.

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?