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This short story originally appeard on Strange Horizons, 7 February 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

"When the alien gets around to unzipping her jumpsuit it'll be impossible to see what's underneath."

UFOlogist Harold Flint is heartbroken and depressed that the aliens that have landed on the White House lawn appear to be straight out of an old B movie. They wave to the television cameras in their sequined jumpsuits, form a nonprofit organization offering new age enlightenment, and hover their saucers over the streets of New York looking for converts.

Harold wants no part of this kitschy invasion until one of the aliens, a beautiful blonde named Asket, begs him to investigate the saucers again and write another UFO book. The aliens and their mission are not as they seem.

Asket isn't who she seems either. Tracking down her true personality leads Harold and his cowriter through a maze of identity and body-swapping madness, descending into paranoia as Harold realizes that reality, or at least humanity's perception of it, may be more flexible than anyone will admit.

After the Saucers Landed is a deeply unsettling experimental satire, placing author Douglas Lain alongside contemporaries like Jeff VanderMeer and Charles Yu as one of his generation's most exciting and challenging speculative fiction voices.

A compelling coming-of-age artificial intelligence novel from Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author Douglas Lain.

Seventeen-year-old Matthew Munson is ranked thirteenth in the state in Bash Bash Revolution, an outdated video game from 2002 that, in 2017, is still getting tournament play. He's a high school dropout who still lives at home with his mom, doing little but gaming and moping. That is, until Matthew's dad turns up again.

Jeffrey Munson is a computer geek who'd left home eight years earlier to work on a top secret military project. Jeff has been a sporadic presence in Matthew's life, and much to his son's displeasure insists on bonding over video games. The two start entering local tournaments together, where Jeff shows astonishing aptitude for Bash Bash Revolution in particular.

Then, as abruptly as he appeared, Matthew's father disappears again, just as he was beginning to let Jeff back into his life.

The betrayal is life-shattering, and Matthew decides to give chase, in the process discovering the true nature of the government-sponsored artificial intelligence program his father has been involved in. Told as a series of conversations between Matthew and his father's artificial intelligence program, Bash Bash Revolution is a wildly original novel of apocalypse and revolution, as well as a poignant story of broken family.

In Douglas Lain's debut novel set during the turbulent year of 1968, Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration for his father's fictional creation Winnie the Pooh, struggles to emerge from a manufactured life, in a story of hope and transcendence.

Billy Moon was Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne, the world-famous author of Winnie the Pooh and other beloved children's classics. Billy's life was no fairy tale, though. Being the son of a famous author meant being ignored and even mistreated by famous parents. He had to make his own way in the world, define himself, and reconcile his self-image with the image of him known to millions of children. A veteran of World War II, a husband, and a father, he is jolted out of midlife ennui when a French college student revolutionary asks him to come to the chaos of Paris in revolt. Against a backdrop of the apocalyptic student protests and general strike that forced France to a standstill that spring, Milne's new French friend is a wild card, able to experience alternate realities of the past and present. Through him, Milne's life is illuminated and transformed, as are the world-altering events of that year.

In a time when the global political landscape eerily mirrors the political turbulence of 1968, this magic realist novel is an especially relevant and important book.

A compelling and thought-provoking anthology collecting original and previously-published fiction themed around the recent US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.

In 1987, the New York Times published their first front-page review of a science fiction anthology for a collection called In the Field of Fire, themed around the war in Vietnam. "Vietnam was science fiction," the reviewer wrote, and writing about it through that lens found meaning in a war few understood.

This idea, that speculative fiction is a vital tool to understanding the inexplicable, is just as relevant nearly thirty years later. Deserts of Fire is a war-inspired anthology for the new millennium, because for many, the recent wars in the deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are just as slippery to grasp and difficult to understand as Vietnam was two generations earlier.

Inside Deserts of Fire are stories from a variety of bestselling and award-winning authors that start with the simple and modest ambition of making the reader feel strange about the recent past. Because when there are too many explanations, the truth won't be found by merely choosing one side or the other. But rather, the truth is in the existence of the confusion itself.

Table of Contents:

• "The Big Flash" - Norman Spinrad
• "The Village" - Kate Wilhelm
• "The Frozen One" - Tim Pratt
• "Language of Monsters" - Michael Canfield
• Presentation to the United Nations Security Council - Colin Powell
• "The Seventh Expression of the Robot General" - Jeffrey Ford
• "Over Here" - Ray Vukcevich
• "Shaytan, the Whisperer" - Pedro Iniguez
• "Five Good Things About Meghan Sheedy" - AM Dellamonica
• "Shadows and Light" - Linda Nagata
• "The People We Kill" - Audrey Carroll
• "In the Loop" - Ken Liu
• "Winnebago Brave" - Rob McCleary
• "Seeing Double" - Ray Daley
• "Sealed" - Robert Morgan Fisher
• "Unzipped" - Stephen Dines
• "The Sun Inside" - David Schwartz
• Excerpt from Corrossion - Jon Bassoff
• "Noam Chomsky and the TimeBox" - Douglas Lain
• "Arms Woman" - James Morrow

In the Shadow of the Towers compiles nearly twenty works of speculative fiction responding to and inspired by the events of 9/11, from writers seeking to confront, rebuild, and carry on, even in the face of overwhelming emotion.

Writer and editor Douglas Lain presents a thought-provoking anthology featuring a variety of award-winning and best-selling authors, from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation) and Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) to Susan Palwick (Flying in Place) and James Morrow (Towing Jehovah). Touching on themes as wide-ranging as politics, morality, and even heartfelt nostalgia, today's speculative fiction writers prove that the rubric of the fantastic offers an incomparable view into how we respond to tragedy.

Each contributor, in his or her own way, contemplates the same question:

How can we continue dreaming in the shadow of the towers?

Table of Contents:

• There's a Hole in the City - (2005) - shortstory by Richard Bowes
• My Eyes, Your Ears - (2010) - shortfiction by Ray Vukcevich
• Beautiful Stuff - (2004) - shortstory by Susan Palwick
• The Goat Variations - (2009) - shortstory by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill - (2015) - shortstory by Kelly Robson
• Retribution - (2012) - shortfiction by Tim Marquitz
• Until Forgiveness Comes - (2008) - shortstory by K. Tempest Bradford
• Pipeline - (2005) - novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
• Unexpected Outcomes - (2009) - shortstory by Tim Pratt
• Closing Time - (2003) - novella by Jack Ketchum
• The Last Apollo Mission - (2011) - novelette by Douglas Lain
• Giliad - (2004) - novella by Gregory Feeley
• Apologue - (2001) - shortstory by James Morrow
• Beyond the Flags - shortfiction by Kris Saknussemm
• Our Lady of Toledo Transmission - shortfiction by Rob McCleary
• Out of My Sight, Out of My Mind - shortfiction by David D. Friedman
• The Zenith Angle (excerpt) - shortfiction by Bruce Sterling
• Little Brother (excerpt) - shortfiction by Cory Doctorow