Traveling in Space (Unabridged‪)‬

A unique science fiction first-contact novel told from the aliens' point-of-view; a 21st-century Gulliver's Travels with Homo sapiens as the Lilliputians. The last thing the factfinders - who call themselves Life - expected to find while traveling in space in The Curious on a mission from their planet, The Living World, was other life. But one day they stumble upon the third planet out from a backwater sun and find it teeming with a vast diversity of life, including one sentient and cognizant, if primitive, species that they dub: Otherlife. Being not only from The Curious but inherently curious themselves, they begin to study the Otherlife and their alien culture, discovering such strange things as: marriage, intoxicating drinks, weapons of minor and mass destruction, the gleeful inhaling of toxic substances, two-parent families, layered language, genocide, non-nude bathing, and - the strangest thing of all - religion. This first contact between Life and Otherlife, disconcerting for both, has moments of humor and moments of horror - and neither escape the encounter unchanged.