100 Astounding Little Alien Stories

Is the alien merely the inhuman? Does it refer only to what falls outside the boundaries of normal human experience? What is "normal" human experience anyway? Does our conception of what is alien change over time, as we become more acclimated to the new and strange? Such are the provocative, unanswerable questions raised by these one hundred astounding tales, a collection of what is probably the most popular type of science-fiction story: the alien story. As the vast number of alien stories have been written over the last two centuries show, it is impossible to come to a once-and-for-all understanding of what is meant by "alien." But such a situation makes a reader's journey through the genre all the more exciting -- and fully in keeping with the wild but clear-sighted imaginativeness that marks really good science fiction. With this well planned volume, journeying readers can make one hundred encounters with as many different life-forms in a space of time that would normally provide one encounter, maybe two.