How to Live on Other Planets A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens

How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens explores the immigrant experience in a science fiction setting, with exciting fiction and poetry from some of the genre's best writers.


In these pages, you'll find Sturgeon winner Sarah Pinsker's robot grandmother, James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner Nisi Shawl's prison planet and Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award winner Ken Liu's space- and time-spanning story of different kinds of ghosts. You'll find Bryan Thao Worra's Cthulhic poetry, and Pinckney Benedict's sad, whimsical tale of genocide. You'll travel to Frankfurt, to the moon, to Mars, to the underworld, to unnamed alien planets, under the ocean, through clusters of asteroids. You'll land on the fourth planet from the star Deneb, and an alternate universe version of Earth, and a world of Jesuses.


This is not a textbook. You will not find here polemics on immigration policy or colonialism. The most compelling fiction articulates the unsaid, the unbearable, and the incomprehensible; these stories say things about the immigration experience that a lecture never could. The purpose of this book is, first and foremost, to entertain the casual and the sophisticated reader, but its genesis is a response to the question: Who do we become when we live with the unfamiliar?





Table of Contents:


Dean Francis Alfar, "Ohkti"
Celia Lisset Alvarez, "Malibu Barbie Moves to Mars"
RJ Astruc, "A Believer's Guide to Azagarth"
Lisa Bao, "like father, like daughter"
Pinckney Benedict, "Zog-19: A Scientific Romance"
Lisa Bolekaja, "The Saltwater African"
Mary Buchinger, "Transplanted"
Zen Cho, "The Four Generations of Chang E"
Tina Connolly, "Turning the Apples"
Indrapramit Das, "muo-ka's Child"
Tom Doyle, "The Floating Otherworld"
Peg Duthie, "With Light-Years Come Heaviness"
Thomas Greene, "Zero Bar"
Benjamin S. Grossberg, "The Space Traveler's Husband," "The Space Traveler and the Promised Planet" and "The Space Traveler and Boston"
Minal Hajratwala, "The Unicorn at the Racetrack"
Julie Bloss Kelsey, "tongue lashing" and "the itch of new skin"
Rose Lemberg, "The Three Immigrations"
Ken Liu, "Ghost Days"
Alex Dally MacFarlane, "Found"
Anil Menon, "Into The Night"
Joanne Merriam, "Little Ambushes"
Mary Anne Mohanraj, "Jump Space"
Daniel José Older, "Phantom Overload"
Abbey Mei Otis, "Blood, Blood"
Sarah Pinsker, "The Low Hum of Her"
Elyss G. Punsalan, "Ashland"
Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Guy Who Worked For Money"
Erica L. Satifka, "Sea Changes"
Nisi Shawl, "In Colors Everywhere"
Lewis Shiner, "Primes"
Marge Simon, "South"
Sonya Taaffe, "Di Vayse Pave"
Bogi Takács, "The Tiny English-Hungarian Phrasebook For Visiting Extraterrestrials"
Bryan Thao Worra, "Dead End In December" and "The Deep Ones"
Deborah Walker, "Speed of Love"
Nick Wood, "Azania"