John Sladek explains the theme of the darkly comic stories in this wonderful collection: "The aliens here are human. This book contains no giant flying snails or telepathic octopods, no Ganymedean cat-women dressed in silver, no aggressive dugong chiefs roaming the galaxy in their pulsar-powered yo-yo ships. The aliens here are human aliens. Most of them work in ordinary offices, and they do not commute to work from Proximo Centauri, either. Yet these here humans are aliens. Office life attracts them ..."