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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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 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.