Well since everyone is stealing my Asimov thunder I was ready to post I guess I'll dig a little deeper: I got a book of great collections of short stories from the used book store a little while back. It's called Time Probe and from various authors and focuses on different sciences. It has Arthur C Clarke's name in a large font on the cover so I suppose this means he had something to do with it. "And He Built a Crooked House" by Robert A. Heinlein wherein we follow an architect who builds a 4 dimensional house based on a tesseract after a night of drinking. And He Built a Crooked House And another from the book: "The Potters of Firsk" by Jack Vance (Sorry I can't find a link to the actual text). I like this because it's a comfortable sci-fi story. What I mean is, without being mean, that its a bit cliche. But I love it for that. There is just that whole idea from earlier scifi where aliens were either too dumb for us or too smart for us.