10 years after a housing development is abandoned in midbuild, a mailman finds himself picking up & delivering mail to the empty(?) homes.

You know what I find creepier than old abandoned houses? New abandoned houses. That is, houses that were mostly built and then never finished. Old houses tend to be singular things that have come to the end of their lives. The new houses that come up as part of a housing development represent dreams stillborn.

I know, I know. Maybe someone just wanted to build them because they thought they’d make a lot of money and they paid as little as possible and the construction is shoddy and anyone living in them would have been miserable. Maybe. I’m one of those sentimentalists who feels bad when someones dream fails, even if it’s just the dream of making some extra dough.

I’m also a bit of an animist so, to me, places have spirits. And a place that was meant to be a home, yet never became one, seems like a very sad place indeed. 

Huge starships enter solar system, consume Pluto, begin harvesting Uranus, at current rate will reach Earth in 100 years

Most stories of alien invasions have the aliens making a beeline for Earth. Sometimes they want to help humanity, sometimes they are just explorers, often they want to take off. But an alien civilization might not be especially interested in either Earth or humanity. If they’ve adapted to life in space a habitable planet (for us) could be just another curiosity. Planets could simply be sources of resources.

And what would humanity do if we knew a technologically superior “enemy” was coming? Band together? Fight more? Invest in defense? Try to contact the invaders?

Lab creates bio-engineered horrors to use as weapons. SEAL team assigned to train them. Training effective. Time for a mission.

How many stories have been written about some secret government experiment or Evil Corporation that creates a monster with intention of using it as a weapon? I’m fairly certain that in every one of those stories the monster turns on its creator(s) and must be destroyed. So, been there, done that.

Are scientists really as careless as that? If you’re going to build a monster (and make a profit in the process) aren’t you going to build in enough safeguards that the thing won’t kill you in the test phase?