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

Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.

On a cold Seattle night, deep in the heart of winter, a woman walks into a bar and finds the beautiful and animal-like woman she has been waiting for. She chases the woman into the night and finds the stranger is not what she seems—but neither is the protagonist.

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 the midst of an interplanetary war, two women meet an alien who is hoping to retrieve the body of his dead brother, whom he honors by consuming his remains.

In an austere farmstead on the distant planet O, two lovers must find a way to fool their fellow citizens and satisfy a complicated series of marriage rites so that their forbidden love may last forever.

A lonely romantic buys a sex robot who falls in love with him. He rejects her advances, which turns him into a cultural phenomenon and sends her into a spiral.

A Russian man recalls the first time he fell in love.

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.

On a far-away planet in a jail cell, a young human woman pregnant with a non-human being urges her child to come quickly, terrified of being murdered by her human companions as she awaits execution.