Gentle Invaders

Aliens are often depicted as malevolent despots, unscrupulous pillagers, conniving bureaucrats, or savage warriors. It's refreshing to see aliens in the spotlight at truly benevolent caretakers or maintaining an innocuous presence. Perhaps these latter two extraterrestrial dispositions don't provide as much cinematic grandeur as the former three, but their seemingly innocent temperament easily allows for humor and emotion to bubble up through an author's creative talents; the stories in Gentle Invaders generally follow this line of thought.

Rear cover synopsis:

"The Alien is most often described by science fictionists as a horror-inspiring monster with insidiously evil intentions. Our monsters are different."

Monsters are often synonymous with aliens because of their projected grotesqueness and wildly exotic physiology. But nearly have the stories in this collection feature humanoid aliens. Food for thought:

"How many of the people you see around you every day, the anonymous people that just look a little odd somehow, the people about who you think briefly that they don't even look human--the queer ones you notice and then forget--how many of them aren't human at all in the sense that we understand that word? (Brackett, p.53)"