I stumbled on this looking for a book that resembled all the stories I’ve read across various FYH boards and sites, and I think this collection of short stories reflects the spirit of it as perfectly as any book can. It shows a lot of variance in each work, showcasing new human and alien interrelations in each chapter.
I have a few favorites from this book. The first story was the best way to start the book off in my opinion. “The machine” tells of a crashed alien who learns from a man the art of food, of flavor; its not a topic I see all that often elsewhere. Something humanity would see as simple about itself, has resounding artistic and emotional effect on our extraterrestrial neighbors, I found this one to be very lovely.
There are those that highlight humanities more reckless and intimidating side as well. My favorite to include these themes is “human altered”, wherein humanity specializes in technology to the point of altering alien spacecraft for extreme efficiency, to the point where aliens themselves cannot understand it, and therefore need a human to continue using it. Banned from weapons, the human engineer in this story gets creative when an enemy spacecraft arrives...and I shall not spoil it any further.
There are many more that I loved, from aliens meeting a cat for the first time, to the subject of humans willingly poisoning themselves (alcohol), and even one opportunistic human taking advantage of poor chumps trying to learn “humanities secret to success” before any other species can (spoiler: the secret is not what you may initially expect...), the book is not without its faults.
I find that some of the themes/general plot lines repeating in some of the stories. Most of the time, it was fine, as the new story would take the plot and integrate at least something new into it. But not always. For comparison, (and definite spoilers for this one), “bite back” is a story showing how devastating a human bite can have on another alien character. That humans can be dangerous in something as simple as a nip, for our teeth are coated in ridiculous amounts of bacteria. I enjoyed this one, it was well paced and got to the point without any hang ups. A couple of chapters later, however, is a story called “saber toothed licker”. It takes the theme of humans having gross mouths, and diminishes its impact ten fold. Basically, an alien mother worries over her child after a human child licked them. Not to worry though, for there are no consequences from this, unlike in “bite back” where the alien bitten eventually dies from infection. I feel like the entire second story could have been vetoed from this book, and it would have been all the better for it. (Or that it incorporated something new alongside the theme of biting/licking.)
To be fair, this is the only story in the book that is just a pale shade of another chapter. All the others have their own defining characteristics that make them great to read on their own.
If you like to frequent FYH sections like I do, or are just looking on refreshing human-alien relations where humanity is the weird one (or even just a story where the aliens aren’t all space monsters...) then I highly recommend this book to you.
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