30 Sci Fi Writing Prompts by Justin McLachlan
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1. A young lawyer graduates into a world where, for the first time, brain scans can
accurately detect lies.
2. A group of scientists discover a cheap, renewable energy source that when put into place
across the world further destabilizes the oil-dependent Middle East.
3. An army general leads a squad of aliens that have come to earth to assist the Allies during
WWII in their fight against Hitler.
4. “I can smell dark matter.”
5. A man wakes to find himself trapped in a Holodeck-like virtual reality simulator. The thing
is, he’s not sure he wants to leave.
6. A civilization faces its destruction as one of its moons breaks orbit and plunges toward the
planet.
7. Mass hysteria hits 1950s New York after a report of a Martian spotted atop the Empire
State Building.
An elderly man creates the first ever artificial life form just before he dies—and it’s a copy of his 20-year-old self.
It’s 2030, and the newest trend is to have one’s eyes replaced with implants that record and upload everything
you see for all the world to watch
A young inventor plans to step into a matter-energy transporter he just invented, for the first time.
“I have to deactivate you. I’m sorry.”
The crew of Earth’s first deep space vessel discover an area of space where Earth’s laws of physics don’t apply.
A Captain sets off on a mission to negotiate an interplanetary alliance, but he’s warned it could lead to Earth’s
destruction.
A fishing vessel near Antarctica pulls what appears to be a new, humanoid species up in its net—and it turns out
to be very, very smart.
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
Faced with a new ice age, Earth’s major civilizations have moved into Arcologies—massive, city-sized buildings
that stretch high into the sky and hold millions of people.
A test pilot returns to Earth after the first-ever faster-than-light space flight.
A scientist races against time to hide his latest invention from the government: a devastating antimatter bomb
that he fears will start World War III.
A group of FBI agents assigned to weird cases discover a parallel universe intruding into our own.
A rift in spacetime allows an alien that looks an awful lot like a dragon to escape into the sky over New York City.
A woman and her boyfriend are out for a night on the town, only to discover they’re trapped in a pocket
universe where everything is the opposite of what it should be.
“Resistance is futile.”
In the not-so-far-future, smartphones have been reduced to the size of microchips that are implanted in wrist
bones, accessed through glowing displays in and holographic projections from the skin.
A hacker creates a virtual currency that quickly becomes the dominant system of money on the entire planet.
A corporate created computer virus disables every device with a microchip on the planet, except for those that
are protected with their high-priced security software.
An alien race chooses a young boy with autism for first contact with humans because the unique pathways in his
brain are perfect for their preferred style of communication: telepathy.
A man invents cybernetic legs to help his dog walk again after three of them are cut off in an accident.
“I’m from another planet. Let’s just say we’re neighbors.”
An alien race makes contact—with King Tutankhamun in ancient Egypt.
The only child aboard a space station saves the day when its crew is plagued by a debilitating illness that only
affects adults.
Ideas licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
10 Tips for Generating Killer Science Fiction Story
Ideas
by Charlie Jane Anders
Science fiction is the literature of big ideas
— so coming up with an amazing story
idea often feels like the biggest stumbling
block in the way of your dreams of
authorship. Unfortunately, most of us can't
just have Robert A. Heinlein mail us $100
and a couple dozen brilliant ideas. So what
do you do? The trick is not just to come up
with a great idea, but a great idea that lives
in your mind and leads to characters and
situations that inspire you. So here are 10
pretty decent ways to generate your own
amazing story ideas.
And it really is true that ideas are dime a dozen in science fiction. Take the idea of "first contact with an alien
race." There are a million possible variations of that idea alone: They come to us. We go to them. They're superadvanced. They're not using anything we'd recognize as technology. They communicate using only colors. They
think emoticons are our language, and all the other stuff is just punctuation. They're giant. They're tiny. They're
invading. They're well-intentioned, but troublesome. And so on.
The hard part is finding an idea that sticks in your head and starts to grow weird angles and curves. In a sense,
it's not about finding a good idea — so much as finding a good idea for you, personally. So here are some tips,
that may or may not be helpful:
1. Look at the big unanswered questions
Like, why haven't we heard from other intelligent civilizations yet? And
what'll happen at the end of the universe? Why is gravity such a weak force?
And so on. The bigger and more insoluble the question, the less likely it is
your answer will be disproved next week. Once you come up with your own
weird explanation for a big cosmic riddle, then you can work backwards
from that to create a story around it — and the hard part is probably keeping
your story big and audacious, but also finding a way to make it small and
personal without resorting to "learning the truth about the cosmological
constant also helped me realize something about my daddy issues."
Everybody loves a big, audacious idea-driven story, as long as it's well done
and emotional.
2. Imagine a new scientific or technological discovery — and then
imagine it ruining your life
It's easy enough to imagine a brand new scientific breakthrough. It's even easy enough to think about some of
the obvious consequences, if we suddenly develop radical life-extension or a "learn while you sleep" process
that works. But try to imagine how a brand new science could wreck your life — how it could make your life,
personally, a living hell. And then try to turn that into a story about a fictional character. (Bonus points if the
way that the new invention ruins your life isn't a super obvious way, and is instead something kind of weird and
personal.) It's always more interesting to see people struggling with new technology than to watch them just do
the happy "yay new technology" dance.
3. Take your biggest fear about the future and take it to an
extreme
This is sort of on a related tip, except that it's taking your
personal fears and blowing them up. Do you worry you'll be
alone and unloved when you're older? Or that your career will
tank, and you'll be one of those people who used to have a decent
job and now works at Round Table Pizza? (No offense to people
who currently work at Round Table Pizza, but whenever I walk
past one I notice the staff look utterly demoralized. Maybe it's the
weird Arthurian/Italian mixed metaphor.) Take your fear about
your personal future and make it huge and global, if not cosmic.
Use that fear as a way into a story about something going terribly
wrong with the world in general. (Or make it still a personal
disaster, but more science fictional — think Robert Silverberg's
Dying Inside, about a telepath slowly losing his abilities.) Your
final story doesn't even need to be depressing, or about the exact
fear you started with. But that visceral dread can lead you to
something personal but universal, which is what it's all about.
4. Instead of speculating about science, try sociology or philosophy
or theology
As Arthur C. Clarke would tell us, science fiction has the ability to get
really cosmic and massive in its explorations of the big questions. Who
are we, where do we come from, who created us, and so on. Why does
time run in only one direction? Why is there only one technological
species on this planet? Is it ever possible for there to be empty space, or
is space a thing? What makes someone a good person? As we've
covered recently, a lot of philosophers are moving into territory
formerly occupied by physics, because physics is dealing with the big
existential questions. So you, too, can leave behind "hard" science and
get into the big questions about meaning — and the result might
actually be purer science fiction than if you just stuck to the actual
science questions.
5. Think of an act you would never approve of, then imagine a sympathetic character doing that act
We all imagine ourselves doing terrible things, all the time. Depending on how repressed you are, it may come
as a shock when the image of yourself stabbing your coworker in the face pops into your head. But either way,
it's human nature to imagine yourself doing things so terrible, they make you do a whole-body cringe/shudder.
So try picking one of those actions, and imagine the protagonist of a story performing it — then try to think of
how your protagonist could do that terrible thing, and still be sympathetic. (Even if this unspeakable act doesn't
remain in the story, it may be a way in to the character.) Maybe there's some science fictional reason why your
main character has to stab people in the face — maybe it's even a heroic act, in some way. The point is only
partly to come up with a clever explanation — it's also to find your own hot buttons and jab at them as hard as
you can. What about yourself freaks you out? Explore that.
6. Why can't you just go and get what you want, in real life?
Chances are, there are goals you can't achieve, in reality. Unless you're
rich and famous and fulfilled, in which case please send me money. You
can't just walk out of your boring job and wander down the street until
you find Kevin Feige and say, "Please make me the director of a new
Hulk movie starring Mark Ruffalo." You can't just wander up to that
incredibly good looking person on the subway and ask him or her out.
At least, most of us can't. You, personally, have goals that you cannot
achieve, that are not fictional. Now imagine a scenario where you could
have all of those things — and what could possibly go wrong with that.
7. Get into a fight with a famous science fiction author
Not literally. Do not go punching Vernor Vinge in the face and then
claim I told you to do that. But sure, get into a fight with Vernor Vinge
with your stories. Find something about how Vinge depicted cyberspace everting in Rainbows End, and write a
story that shows how you think he should have done it. Don't like how Max Barry depicted cybernetic
enhancements in Machine Man? Stick it to Max Barry by writing your own take on the subject. A lot of how
science fiction has advanced, as a field, is authors trying to one-up each other and responding to each other's
takes on the same basic ideas. Even if you don't prove everybody else wrong, you might get a really great story
out of it. (Again, do not actually get into a fight with anybody.)
8. State the obvious
The world is full of obvious facts that everybody tries to pretend aren't real. We
all sort of know that we're reading and writing this stuff on computers that were
made by people who were working in unimaginably horrible conditions. There
may be people alive today, who will live to see the end of the fossil fuel era.
The icecaps are melting faster than a lot of people expected. And so on. There
are things that we all sort of know, but we don't really grasp them because
they're too huge and unthinkable. Fiction is really excellent for getting people to
confront these sorts of realities that are too insane for us to assimilate. And
science fiction, in particular, has a lot of ways to talk about uncomfortable,
weird facts without getting preachy or sledgehammery, by changing the setting
or scale. You can make people identify with someone who's smack in the
middle of future water wars, and drive home the likelihood of water shortages without ever lecturing.
9. Come up with five non-obvious consequences of a
technological or scientific breakthrough, and focus on one
of them
This is sort of similar to the "ruining your life" thing — but it
doesn't have to be about your life, in particular, being ruined.
Science fiction authors are usually pretty good at wargamingout the possible ramifications of a new piece of technology. If
people had brain implants that let them understand any human
language, would we travel more? Would there be more
international trade? Less war? (More war, because people
would know when they were being insulted?) But sometimes
the most interesting consequence is the one you'd never think of
in a million years. Spend an hour or two thinking of all the
possible ripple effects from a new miracle technology — and
then pick one of the least obvious to build your story around.
10. Think about something you used to believe, and then
imagine what if it was true
We all have beliefs we've discarded over the years. Everything
from "Santa Claus is real" to "authority figures are always
right" to "Alan Greenspan is infallible" to "Classical physics
explains everything in the universe." Pick a belief you used to
hold, that's been disproven by events or that you've outgrown
for some reason. It could be a scientific belief, or a religious
one, or a philosophy you used to adhere to — and try to
imagine a universe where that belief is provably true. Or else, a
character who believes the thing you used to believe yourself.
Take all of the energy of your former belief, plus the distance
that comes from your change of heart, and try to create a story
around that. Sometimes, recalling a former state of mind can be
the easiest way to create a compelling mindspace for a
character — and possibly a whole piece of world-building.
Magazine images via Toyranch, McClaverty, Dan Century, Modern Fred, Mickey the Pixel and Ussatule on
Flickr.