Aboard a human city ship headed for Proxima b, shadows begin to haunt the sleeping passengers. An engineer commits suicide, and a psychotherapist finds that these apparitions feed on human guilt. The only way to survive is to master and confront the mounds of guilt that each human passenger carries inside herself.

In a dystopic future on Earth, as a woman comes home from vacation, she hears about a continent emerging from the sea as old ones sink, and returns to find her husband released from Rehabilitation Camp. He and his fellow researchers discover how to make a “sun tap” to channel the sun’s energy into power, but then he is again forced away by the government, into a hospital.

A series of journal entries based in the far future mark a middle-aged female scientist’s descent into Adamancy: a disordered obsession with diamantine structures on Neptune that, when melted, allow for instantaneous travel through space. The diaries, alongside reportage on the creation of “the Melee,” or teleportation technology from these diamonds, tell the story of the scientist’s entrapment by her colleague— and her attempted escape.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

In the near future, two men—a quiet, rule-following biologist and a swashbuckling engineer—are tasked with a decades-long mission to colonize a planet outside the Solar System. But in the spaceship’s close quarters, tensions bubble up until one man decides he is going to kill the other.

When a low-budget science fiction television show successfully predicts the discovery of extraterrestrial life, its cult followers investigate its mysterious origins, only to be met with more mysteries.

In a distant future where movies are made across the solar system, a filmmaker encounters several obstacles before making a groundbreaking discovery.

In contemporary New York, an unlikely friendship develops between the starship that hovers above the city and the Earth’s human representative. The ship faces a difficult dilemma—it must decide whether to leave to help its creators or to stay with its new human friend.

An older Indian man recounts his story of "alien" encounters on Mars during Saturday tea.

Two assistants on a distant planet rebel against their captain, who is a naturalist, and plan to leave him stranded. The naturalist studies the local creatures and devises a plan to create a diversion, allowing him to regain the ship and control.