It's been 48 hours since I finished this book and between all this time I couldn't form any words to describe how amazing this book was! Even now all that I am going to do to justify my reading experience for this book—which I believe will not be enough for everything that I got from it. Space science and exploration are one of those topics I always love to discover in all the possible ways that I can, and its vastness always makes me believe that I will never be able to learn everything about it. All its related theories, speculations, and countless possibilities of how human species may survive in the future when the mother earth will give up on us and we will have to find our new home somewhere else, maybe in some other solar system or maybe...just too far away!

Author Clayton Graham's ‘Looking For Life’ tops on my list of most favorite collection of short stories by leaving behind Murakami's ‘Men Without Women’ and James Patterson's ‘Kill Or Be Killed’. It holds this place because of its seventeen short stories that are a marvelous blend of science fiction and technologies. Most of these stories had its premise around human's first encounter with aliens and many of them presented a dystopian world where we—humans— lost many of our resources and had to find new ways to make earth habitable one more time.

Here are all possible contents that these short stories are based on. If any of these contents fascinates you then this is the best pick for you.

•Time travel
•Alien invasion
•Cloning
•Interplanetary conflicts
•Tele-transportation
•Computerized planets
•Earth after human extinction
•Terraformed world
•Hybrid Collaboration Between humans and Aliens
•Regeneration of habitat
•Telepathic powers

These are just some common themes of the stories that I mentioned but in reality, these short stories are much more than a nerd like me can consume. The author has written them in a manner where he literally puts the reader in its premise and by the way he describes the world and scenes, it feels like to be in some intense virtual reality where the author lets his readers experience and witness those possibilities of future.

I didn't just read these books but learned many things about it as well and the best takeaway that I will always remember is from the story ‘Desperate Times’. It taught me something that I never cared to consider: if a person may time travel to a specific time, his intellect may affected by that time as well. Just like in that story when the protagonist time travels to 120 AD, he faces difficulty to recognise the language and signs of his machine because the intellect of 120 AD would certainly be unaware of that development in the language.

‘Desperate Times’ isn't the only story that blew my mind but ‘Looking For Life’, ‘Mother’, ‘The Visitor’, ‘The Whisper of Waves’, ‘Others of Our Kind’, ‘Worthy of Consideration’ and a few more were equally remarkable. The author's writing, language, the justification to all his characters—humans, robots, and even aliens, the pace of all stories, and the scenic portrayal of premises, everything about this book was flawless.

I am highly recommending this book if you are into various topics of science and contents like space and time travel, dystopia and sci-fi technologies excite that nerd within you.

What a fun collection of speculative stories in the best tradition of the genre. There was a great variety of terrestrial and extraterrestrial settings and character and some great twists at the end. Graham's ability to tell a full story and leave you wanting more are on display here.

“Looking for Life” is a collection of 18 short stories by Graham Clayton. I was first introduced to this author with his well-written book, “Saving Paludis”. It’s about the human conquest of an alien planet with a storyline that reminded me of the plight of American Indians during US pioneering expansion. Each story has sufficiently developed characters and a ponderous ending.

Writing short stories can be challenging. The character’s environment, character development, and storyline must be written concisely and entertainingly. Clayton has is a master at Sci-Fi short storytelling.

The 18 stories in the book take place in space, on earth, and in time. All of them include individuals whose thinking is restricted by inherent shortcomings identifiable as human nature. “Looking for Life” would make a good daily commuter’s companion as the stories are the right length, about a 30 to 45-minute read, and represent a perfect escape from daily servitude requirements.

What exactly is special, and precious, about the work of Clayton Graham? In a world with a plethora of Science Fiction choices: Golden Age, Classic, Contemporary--what is the benefit for the reader of choosing to read Mr. Graham?


First of all, his Science Fiction is realistically imaginable, "could eventually happen," never so out-of-this-world we couldn't feature it. Second, his world building is scrumptious, it's subtle and precise, never verbose: just a few words, and "we are there. " Third, oh his characters! I love them, I admire this particular talent for delineation. He is a master of "show, don't tell," applying to the psychological as well as to the physical. Just as two wonderful examples, I give you "The Comedian " and the eponymous "Looking For Life." But don't rely on me: go read this collection of seventeen outstanding tales for yourself.

I felt this book was a cross between Ray Bradbury Theater and The Outer Limits. Normally, I do not enjoy short stories, as they are over before the story develops, but Graham fleshes out the plot rather quickly and always with a twist on the plot.