The play is an often humorous, unsentimental coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy, Lewis, who is obsessed with flying saucers, UFO abductions and imagines aliens are invading the earth.
Lewis lives in a housing commission suburb on the outskirts of the city, Melbourne with his single mother, sister, and grandmother, who is rapidly approaching senility.
The Currency Press publication of the script states the play is set in "A Housing Commission Estate in the paddocks or northern Melbourne in the early sixties".
The latter theme is evidenced by Eric, the protagonist's father, whose recollections of the past are questionable, and Lewis' grandmother, who is losing her memory.
The play follows Lewis' journey as he comes to grips with human nature – in all its forms – and its capacity for cruelty and prejudice, resilience and joy, and most of all, love.
References throughout the play to the Cold War and anxieties of the time about territorial invasion serve as a fitting historical backdrop.
The published play contains a five-page foreword by the author titled "I was a Teenage Alien" which provides some background about how the work came to be written.
[10] Set some time after the events of Summer of the Aliens, a much older Lewis agrees to direct a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, featuring a cast of patients from a Melbourne mental institution.