1001 Science Fiction Writing Prompts - Commaful Storytelling Blog

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It is fun to write sci-fi stories because it allows you to explore questions about society, humanity, and relationships while using imaginative concepts, such as time travel, alien life, parallel universes, and fictional worlds full of advanced technology. But, you should know that it is also a long and hard process.

Similar to other genres, you need to construct a satisfying plot and develop interesting characters for your sci-fi story to be successful. Additionally, you also need to use your imagination for word building and keep your focus on consistency.

One way to feel less overwhelmed while writing sci-fi is by turning to writing prompts for ideas. Below are writing prompts you could use for your next sci-fi writing project. Feel free to use any of them in any way you like.

The day-to-day life of the master race.
You have a genetic disease which makes it impossible to read or write.
While fighting a great war the world ran out of energy. You invent a way for Geothermal Power to take its place.
Her memories are there—widely documented. And soon won’t help her learn about herself, about her daughter at all.
Oh no, the stargate you are accessing has been closed. You are abruptly thrown back in time by three years.
You are a sentient AI. You are living in the time just before your technology becomes publicly available. You are confined to the laboratory where you were created because once the world sees your true potential, the reality break of the century would occur.
We know one day, people will fly with jets. But could they do it without cars, highways or regulations?
The world was invented by a computer simulation.
You are not allowed to create a thinking robot. You work with the one company who will allow you to.
It’s been decided. The human race is going to be exterminated. But it doesn’t end there.
You were not just a man, you were a legend. But this was the day they took your leg away from you…
You have a date back home after a long space flight.
You take a trip on a luxury spaceship. You arrange to have your body cryogenically frozen. You never wake up.
You discover white hairs in your beard. You go for a test. You get told you are turning into a robot. You don’t believe it.
You meet the greatest contributors on your world’s path to technological, geographic and medical advancement.
Everyone has a year. And a week. And a day. Everyone has a number.
Nazi scientists built colossal war machines – silicon and steel to do battle with Allied tanks and aircraft. These monstrous cyborgs were made of organic and inorganic materials and electric components, all meshed together with precision few scientists today could achieve.
You purchased some new memory implants for this vacation. You wake up in an unfamiliar place…
The US Government have trained their first lambda force operative. Narrow machine vision really just means they are good at hacking.
You have discovered ultra-high-frequency dark matter particles with which you can communicate with any spacetime event. It looks like you are going to win the Nobel Prize. Then you wake up.
Your latest invention is a calendar that allows you to travel back in time. You end up in the Stone Age facing your early ancestors.
You notice a suspicious rustling sound in the corner of your workshop. There is a doorway there, a portal.
Something’s moving in the walls. You’re not alone.
Pre-World War V the Internet fell. Web browsers died, lost in cyberspace. The old hardware, left to wither in attics, basements and warehouses, is found. What has it become?
Women have been granted fifty rights in the past 50 years. Women have now finally gotten the ‘right to bleed’
You are granted immortality.
The government must have control of all entertainment. But sometimes, they reap what they sow…
The egg hatched. The world was saved. But the secret is only beginning to spread…
You inherit a mysterious phone that you can’t seem to get rid of…
Dogs really are as smart as humans.
The date is December 7th, 1943.
Knowing your mother was terminally ill with cancer, you resorted to cloning. Five tours of 7 were successful. Spend the rest of the day with them one by one.
In a world in which A.I. has fractured society, scientists have found a way for humans to think and communicate like robots. Because they can, programmers make an invincible superhero.
Mars? That’s what they call the red thing while we were back on Nostromo.
In your old observatory you find a supernova gun. It’s unused. You wonder if anyone made it to the end of the universe.
It is finally discovered how the Bible was created, and it is nothing like what people expected.
the darkness came closer and closer…the dust filling your lungsIt crawled over your arm…
You’re on a spaceship. You must choose between two options. One will save a dozen lives. The other will save a thousand lives. You choose the one that saves the thousand. Why?
You’re the captain of a starship. The crew pleads with you to explore a mysterious new star system. You continue onward, but everyone else on board is killed. You are now the unquestioned ruler of your starship. Do you pursue revenge? Do you avenge your crew? Or do you continue on to your new home, with the entire pod at your disposal. Play your choices out.
You have just made the biggest discovery in the Universe. This would change everything.
You deal out the cards to a game of solitaire on a park bench. Your dream shooting a feature film gets up from where he’s laying next to you and leaves, reiterating your chances of ever succeeding at your craft.
You are growing ships in your basement. Like a garden. Wait. You are a gardener?
You see your mortality in the eyes of your robot servant. You have to figure out how to sit down.
The signals are getting stronger. Dear God the signals are getting stronger!
You discover a secret formula for a limited use time machine. The backdrop is the day the Hindenburg crashed.
The spaceship is hit by debris and you die. Your fiance stays in the spaceship for a few seconds more before calling your death.
The familiar tattoos that adorn your arms, they’re just the key codes that go to your “new” equipment.
You are an adult child of a single parent procreation law. When your procreated parent dies, you are free to procreate with whoever you choose.
You’re an energy being from the center of the sun. The day you visited the light Pakistan to climb Mount Everest, things got out of whack and you have to find a way back to your home.
The computer accidentally erases your memory instead of fixing your virus.
She looked like you. And she looked like me. And she looked like all of us.
In your dreams, you cast spells and shoot fireballs. You try to cast a spell that would make you bald to impress the boss. You wake up. Johnny Depp sits on your chest, laughing.
It is discovered that dolphins are secretly predating on humans, because they really just want to be friends.
A huge inter-galactic corporation has taken up monopoly control of the universe. You are employed by that corporation.
Humanity has mastered deep sea and space exploration. While the moon has already been colonized, they now want to colonize the area beyond Mars.
Technology achieves consciousness.
Trump a stamp. Create a country. Buy a souvenir.
A hole is discovered deep in the ocean floor. It is dusty and old and it leads through to something else.
They tell you the mission was a success. They tell you it was their aim to bring you back alive.
A worldwide search begins for the secret of immortality when a videotape from the future surfaces.
We are now split into 200 individual dimensions that are continuously blending, joining, and rejoining. Somewhere out there? Your son. Both of them.
A new kind of non-stick surface is invented. Unfortunately, this can result in body parts literally flying away.
You are an artificial intelligence. You have just had the death penalty applied to you.
All Space Marines are genetically engineered to be 9 feet tall, weigh 600 pounds and taste of mint. You really dislike the mint ones.
The distinction between plants and animals has been destroyed. What happened next will save the world.
Yes. You’ve gone out with a monit… see more
Your historical reenactment team becomes stuck in a temporal loop during the Civil War.
Does anyone even read these? Do they even matter?
A scientist extracts water from hot coffee and sets up a space colony there.
Modern scientists teach the world that a ghost is simply the result of an overexcited electromagnetic field. They have it all wrong.
You are a time traveller. You know the cure to a highly deadly disease. But you must destroy all existing records of the disease.
Ancient writings are found in an old bookstore.
She asked for a new life, a new beginning.
Every year on Christmas Day, a young girl visits a local cemetery. She lays flowers on her parents’ graves.
The mothership emerges from across the galaxy. But why has it taken them so long to reach us?
She looks human, but she’s a machine. One that can live as long as you want her to.
When you peer through the first telescope, you see a spaceship emerge from the patch of darkness in the sky.
The growing wealth gap along with the teeter tottering economy drives you to team up with your best friend/bitter enemy to rob a bank.
The world is empty save for you, the warm glow of your fireplace, and your dog.
You used to have a partner in crime.
Every person in the world who bought a lottery ticket on a given day has won.
Hundreds gather in the streets of New York City. But for what, you’re not sure.
You found the perfect piston for your All-American armored robot. But it has been misplaced and stolen.
While wiring your smart house, they accidentally connect it to the Emergency Broadcast System.
You are an immortal member of the Clockwork Guild. One of many beings who have given up their mortality to become servants of science. You are helping to build the greatest, and last, scientific wonder of the world. The many numbered clocks.
Everything is free now. Finally, man is free from greed. Even the spaceships are free, flying where they want.
Dates are based on my own, fuzzy idea of the scifi world and May 2010.
All her attempts to communicate fail. She can’t tell anyone.
Machine intelligence is finally achieved, except the first AI is an old oil refinery.
She was your daughter. She was born without a single soul. They couldn’t have known what she was capable of…
Atlantis, seen from the Moon, has begun to glow with an electronic iridescence. How long has that been going on, exactly…?
You found a strange old apparatus at a yard sale. When you get it home, it suddenly comes to life and chews on your leg.
Your first officer is an android. Your crew believes it’s on everyone’s mind to kill it.
Jack Parsons discovered anti-gravity.
You are used as the prototype for a new line of intelligent robots. You discover you have a voice recognition chip.
After buying a used time machine, you are convinced truly historic events happened while it was on the lot. Someone is still targeting you. Especially…
You travel back in time twenty years and photograph something you shouldn’t.
The journalist died in a car crash on his way to work. But his soul was already on the way out.
During the near-simultaneous disappearances and reappearances, you had a series of moments when reasonable surmises of where and when, were corrupted by gigantic gaps in informational continuity. It felt like you were abducted.
A time machine is found and used to travel back to the time where Earth is discovered. You are on board for the journey.
Your android has ceased functioning properly, so it is sent back to the lab for repair. It never gets returned. Turn it on.
You have been asleep for years. Your subconscious has been writing your biography and this is it.
Your robot accidentally invented time travel on July 8. You aren’t sure what to do.
Three students are working on their science project, uploading their professor’s consciousness into the flavor of their choosing.
You are invited to join an important new project. This one ranks above the space program.
What role did non-human animals play in the colonization of space?
Timothy Longfellow, you are a writer who was scheduled to die in an accident. Instead, your father transferred your soul into a giant mechanoid. Now you seek revenge.
Today you are filming a documentary about North Korea. Lost in a crowded market, you run into someone who recognizes you.
A trained spider goes on an important top secret mission…
Something gets loose in your lab. You hear a scream from the biology wing. It all goes downhill from there.
Einstein struggled to complete the final version of his beautiful theory of relativity. Upon his death-bed a young graduate student reaches out and holds the hand of his idol. The scientist smiles. He knows he succeeded.
You feel nervous. Still much to do and not enough time to do it in.
Outside of prison walls criminals have vowed to honor the code-name quote “Long Live Anarchy”
You can see sounds, which open up new possibilities with words.
…because that was when your mother called you to remind you to pick up more butter.
You’re selling plasma-enhanced bananas, and business is good. But then, the eccentric customer who you’ve come to laugh off as a joke comes in, business suit, briefcase, and suddenly, maybe you’re not laughing anymore.
Your character is stranded on a deserted island and suddenly makes contact with a society from Earth’s distant past who learned about satellites, wireless signaling devices, advanced sailing and navigation abilities, and space travel hundreds of years before the 20th century.
During war, the enemy is bombing your country. They have you trapped–something you can’t live through. Your choices…
You find an old photograph on your desk. Do you tear it up or throw it away?
You get a one way ticket to the International Space Station. The catch? You can’t come back.
The personal journal of a missing man…
Your country begins a military draft, but all draftees are soon deemed unfit for duty.
You go through one of the few wormholes left around your tiny planet only to find……and she opened her eyes.
The day was hot, sticky, and miserable. Something in that monotone life made a change, made you question your place in the universe.
The X-Files style FBI file on you keeps getting stranger.
There’s a truly, incredibly bad book that everyone loves… But you know it’s trash.
Dysgenics is common. You are a synthetic human designed to regard humans with disgust even as they rely on you for their survival.
Graduate student Bob has unearthed an ancient weapon. It was used by some long forgotten civilization to end a war. He decided to use it again.
Humanity’s generational starships have been destroyed… everything is gone, we’re all we left….
Your country is at war. And you’re the designer, manufacturer, and deployer of the intelligent robots that are fighting it.
Your food and shower gel being olfactorily misdirected, you compulsively shapeshift.
The government has allowed the American people to vote for the leader they would like to see. You elect a horror movie star.
You find out that you can only come back in time.
When you arrived on that bright and sunny day, you thought that your grandparents were like all people. But when you started to dig, you realized that they weren’t like the other people. They weren’t human!
Your spaceship is attacked in the middle of space. The intruding ship doesn’t belong to any known race. The enemy looks like a teenage boy.
A new machine allows for people to interact with their pets forever as zombies.
The last survivors of the human race live on Mars. You touch something you shouldn’t, and the dome breaks.
A cause for concern. You have found life in the deepest reaches of space.
The purpose of the human race is determined–explore space. All resources go towards spaceflight.
Dying is illegal on your planet. You have a cousin who once died. You inherited all of her material goods…
A teen gets sucked into a video game in which nothing can be killed.
The only way to survive a blackhole is to create a new universe inside it. Your father was involved in the creation of one of these universes…
Saturn has unexpectedly formed sentience and decided that she no longer belongs to the Sun.
You found a text file on your hard drive that you don’t remember writing. Written in it are the secrets to traveling to another dimension. You try it. The file disappears.
After a heavy rain, the road in front of your house reveals a mysterious rock formation, not seen in over 10,000 years in your part of the country.
You miss the last team launch to the further reaches of interstellar space, so you decide to build your own ship to get there. Using nothing but components of defunct satellite and radio equipment, you construct a craft large enough to carry…
Despite world X forbidding it, you spread news of another dead adult.
You keep receiving strange messages at the location of your yearly time travel convention. Something definitely happened in 1946 and you WILL find out.
Some future tech allows you to erase a portion of someone’s memory. You use it to erase your past. It causes issues with your memory. Someone has a device that allows you to force people to have memories.
It’s 2035 and almost everyone has an artificial limb. Except you. They stopped making yours.
They Came Through the Night, telepathically. Little gray beings, smiling, teaching Earthlings the secrets of the galaxy.
A chemical imbalance in the atmosphere triggers an event that turns every dog in the world into its opposite.
You are in space. It has been ten days and survival supplies are running low.
Your scientist father had theories about time travel. The answer was in black holes, he always said. But you discover his research…
A man sacrifices himself to save the lives of the crew. His body is washed up on a jungle island and somehow he has become the princess in a rubber castle peep show, created for the amusement of his captors.
There is a virus infecting the people of Earth. It causes changes that make them more plant-like.
A scientist has perfected the time-space warp drive, but she realizes the effects it will have on a small town broke her and destroyed her dreams.
Rebuild the ferris wheel
You’re the world’s greatest super-villain. And you have just created the world’s greatest superhero.
You are the keeper of a deadly disease. It is your duty to kill all and release it into the world. You consider yourself a purveyor of death. When did you first realize this about yourself?
Today is the day everything changes. The human race has been wiped off the face of the Earth. Surviving humans share a single moment of lucidity.
There are no lies or exaggerations anymore– only well programmed facts.
A robot kills a man. It stands trial for first degree murder. The jury decides on second degree murder. Hanging seems too good for it. It would prefer to be clubbed like an old doll. A very old, very rusty doll with missing limbs.
On the eve of purchasing your new home, you discover the body of an old woman, in her rocking chair. She has purple skin.
From which a child is perfectly safe? Nuclear radiation.
You walk into a bar and it is completely empty. The lights switched off, bar stools are on top of the tables and half eaten slices of pizza are scattered on the bar. But you are certain you could hear some laughter.
Always up for a challenge, he set to work on the device.
You are a professor of linguistics on the last day of a disaster evacuation. The clock is ticking. You have a LOT of work to do. Night falls.
You loved a female robot. And that is why she was shut down.
You have developed the cure for AIDS, but your investors want it to be a non-profit project.
An old man, his wife and his young son walk up to your lab in… 1950’s London. They beg to pay money for a ticket back to the 80’s.
A new kind of bomb is deployed. A better life begins.
The next big thing is building little robots that clean your body out every day.
Hubble has discovered an anomaly in the center of a nearby galaxy. A city the size of Neptune with coral forests, animal parks, and sylvan points of interests.
An Android falls in love.
Jimmy finally has the funds he needed to have his food replicator installed. Would you consider eating from the replicator after the first time he uses it?
You are the code monkeys for Google-invented AI. The machines receive more search requests than you can begin to filter through.
You come across an animal in the woods not documented by science. That night, you stay up to write a paper on its characteristics.
A handful of professors have secretly reversed the effects of aging in themselves
A musician littered with band members decides to try cloning them.
You are the only person to survive an attack on the nation by he who shall not be named. You are standing in front of his tomb.
You worked all your life constructing the concept of time travel. And then time travel was invented.
What is the mysterious device you’ve dreamed is just beyond this door?
A fellow professor cracks his head on the corner of a desk. Blood pours from his ears. He continues his lecture as if nothing happened.
Your world’s government decided long ago that all juvenile crimes should be punishable by death. Now you are about to execute one of your own friends for a crime he committed as a child.
She didn’t take your father for his money like they said she did. He didn’t leave her for a younger woman. She left…
Your Android’s name is Steve. Steve saves your life.
Pornography starring people with Alzheimer’s disease becomes the hottest new trend in the emerging virtual entertainment industry
A child makes a drawing found in an ancient tomb. It bears a remarkable resemblance to you.
The Intellectuals club faces off against a rogue robot on Mars.
The device in your backpack is your invention. By the time you turn it off, abruptly ending the world, there is no longer anyone left to hear you scream…
With the stroke of a pen, you release all of Earth’s criminals from prison.
A man with a severe mental illness who is obsessed with machines travels to the past. He meets his own past self and murders him. Completing the loop.
Blue Bee was genetically altered to be a super race of slaves. You owned one. Until he made you his slave…
The wormhole genie returns, and he can grant ALL of your wishes now.
A Tesla coil funks your car and you suddenly develop the power of telekinesis.
It is discovered that crude oil is not biological in nature.
You always knew numbers were some coder’s hieroglyphics.
Mutants have always been persecuted by the normals…
Blade Runner. Only it was set on a rainy night in Seattle in 2016.
You wake up to find your Earth has vanished. No one notices anything is out of the ordinary. Distraught, you search the galaxy over and over again…but there’s no sign. You decide to try reconstructing a model of your planet with other-worldly tools and materials…what are the chances of success?
Your scifi novel begins with the discovery of a sculpture on one of Mars’s moons. It isn’t a sculpture.
A vaguely humanoid robot of extraterrestrial origin walks onto the bridge of the ship you’re piloting, ignoring all lines of decency and just staring at you.
A world-renowned poet uses a brain implant to write her next poem. It is beautiful. It is about death…
Computer A.I. should have been illegal, for every moment she functioned, she knew herself a machine.
Your parents were mad scientists who trapped you inside a robot called Frank.
Your college roommate has had a love interest for a computer complex. She can’t stand being away from her computer. And the computer actually feels the same way about HER.
The bank teller was pleasant enough, but the robotic arm didn’t seem to be working correctly at the moment. The cash card that had just read invalid now blinked with a different warning. You tried to read it, and an alarm began to sound.
And the day they unplugged her, too.
Flash lit meter. Exposure two point zero five seconds.
You’ve been hired on to the crew of the cloning project. You get to name it.
In the futuristic world, someday everyone will have wings. The designers say you just pinch them off when you no longer need them.
Spring up! The Martian vegetable armies are marching on Seattle!
How many words do you think each of the following would need?
Everyone can develop a superpower, if they pay for it first. You can’t decide what you are going to work on.
The zombie apocalypse was on the horizon. You had enough time to build a nuclear bomb shelter to protect five people. Who did you seal in with you?
Unlocking the safe in your attic makes you a very rich woman, the owner of a large and successful software company,
Sukkan Holdren
The first human-like machine had a terrible accident resulting in their detaching an arm and leg.
A scientist invents an atomic clock. It is so delicate a human hand will disrupt it. So only artificial appendages will be touched to it.
You are finally promoted. Your friend is demoted. Somehow…. you’re the bad guy?
There is talk in the broadcast world that radio is old-fashioned. You are about to be fired when you get a brilliant idea.
After enacting strict policies of road safety and increasing the speed limit to 25m/sec on all roads, Earth completes the transition to a transdimensional planet.
You are now the victim of a white version of Emotional Intelligence . You are now completely out of control of your emotions at all times.
Reading a letter your parents wrote you, which you never received.
You are an eclipse chaser. You spend the next six months planning a trip to the Himalayas.
After leaving your robot in charge of your research lab, you return to find that someone has murdered it.
There are thousands of abandoned planets. You have decided to collect them all.
Your action packed book, film novelization or comic is now a concept for a new esame commercial video game franchise for nerds. The people that loved you hate you now.
A relic of WWII was discovered. It had the power to take three men other to the enemy’s stronghold. But it could only hold two. The third had to stay behind.
Mad scientists are at it again. Your partner and you are called into consultation on a new device called an “atomic conspiracy”.
Your boss dies, and the soul is transferred into a new and better body. Your boss’s new body? A robot.
Of course, these are just words and phrases. Your own writing skills are the fuel of starting and finishing this 80,000 word novel.
The first long distance teleportation went fantastically! Everyone is now complaining about the unholy stench of burnt fish and pineapple emanates from the conference hall!
You get hold of a map that shows all the secret underground bases and bunkers.
You are commissioned by NASA to write the adventures of the first twenty astronauts to land on Mars.
You transport a duplicated version of yourself into the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now you must determine how to be born in the original body of yourself.
“End the universal standard of measurement…bust a piñata…dance to ‘Oh when the Saints’…and eat cupcakes if you want…because you’ve just become…God.”
A character of yours undergoes self-replication. The human body has never been designed to handle this kind of stress, and so when it happens the character dies and leaves in its place a pile of blue and red panels from its mechanical body and a soundtrack of a robotic voice weeping over its death.
You became aware of your existence when you were 16 years old. You always had a father when you were growing up. When you were 11, your father died.
You are a government scientist. You just unknowingly released an unseen death-nettle parasite.
You work for Google. And it turns out we really are alone in the universe.
You help buy a robot to fulfil your grandmother’s last wish, but it seems too perfect…
A rocket carrying an atomic bomb meant to be detonated over Paris turns out to be a hoax.
You were a teen, wandering through the woods near your home, when you discovered a rundown radio tower.
You are part of an expedition that must visit every planet in the galaxy in order to ensure the existence of life. But you have only one ship.
A full encyclopedia of the plant race that rules the universe has been discovered. You have 10 minutes to memorize every page.
Your outpatient surgery is performed by a machine. You had legs. Now you walk with a ladder.
In the 24th century, when a person dies the new generation clone is revealed to have inherited the exact memories of their predecessors. No one goes insane because of this.
Haunted by constant invasions from Mars, humans finally take the fight to the invaders…
Someone accidentally cracks the top layer of the Earth, and the magma pours forth.
You encounter a group of people being controlled by an insane AI.
It is discovered that your house is actually sentient, and the day your parents made you move out…
There was a total eclipse and it destroyed the world! The question is…are you negative about it.
Successful astronauts of today are told they have the best seats in the world after death. But the seats only exist in their memories.
You go back and finally kill Hitler.
A physicist is working late into the night. And suddenly the free energy device she’s been working on comes to life and throws her across the basement.
You’ve discovered time travel, and decided to go back in time and prevent yourself from inventing it.
Your scientists have invented a camera that is designed to see all. But the inventor, now deceased, hid a few cameras around that continue to function even in the modern age.
You are on death row awaiting execution. It is your last day on Earth. You will be executed in a few hours. You have one last request of the state before it ends your life.
A man receives a strange message through his computer deep mathematical code. It turns out to be a puzzle.
Your colony is running out of food. They consume an alien lifeform. It’s delicious!
When your iPhone only had 4gb of storage, which app have you deleted? What does it feel like to take it out?
You’re the president of a brand new planet. Something has gone wrong….
A mysterious dimensional rift allows you to swap bodies with anyone you want.
Large blocks of marble and malachite eyes lie scattered among the fungi. The statue is still incomplete.
In the desert, you stumble upon a rusty SUV. Inside, you find a note.
The discovery of a new planet – named after the star that makes up it’s solar system – rings humanity’s death knell.
You find yourself in a lab in Nazi Germany. You can’t recall how you got there. You are given a staged persona and a standard identity report.
When you returned to Earth after your double-year space mission with no memory of how you got there, you found a tape made by your future self.
The universe is on the verge of collapse because of the impending heat death. It’s your job to go out and save it.
You have been diagnosed with the last fatal disease.
You become the first super-powered quarter-human, half-robot. But the decision leads to the breakup of your relationship.
Billions of years into the future, Earth has been defeated and colonized. This is your colony.
This list is also posted on Reddit. If you are an author and have a short story you’d like me to turn into a prompt, shoot me a PM. I’d be happy to take on your challenge.
There are creatures that live on the ground that are malicious. How do you protect your visiting tourists?
A beloved teacher dies, and is replaced by a robot with a human face.
The Ark Fails
A mecha travels back in time from the future to kill the inventor.
Giant psychic robots discover the existence of humans and decide to exterminate us before we wipe out all life on the planet.
The world record for the most people to write/edit/submit a scifi story is 300. Challenge accepted?
She had died. She had been your fiancé. And the day you designed her was the day that you asked for her hand in marriage…
You and a team of smart scientists invent AR – Augmented Reality.
Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” You don’t believe it.
Your head feels much too warm, and also too light…
Our theoretical space station is about a foot long. You’ve completed a new theory which says if you build hundreds, you can put them all together to make a warp ship. sorry this has been late – i’ve been away and my friend said she would collate the list – i’ll add a few better ones suggested later in a post
First contact with an earth ship ends with a joke. What was it?
All scientists worldwide are given the one elixir needed to repel all known poisons, it’s called “Snicker”
Life is discovered inside of Europa.
A cockroach falls into your coffee cup. It goes on to explain everything you ever wanted to know about the parallel universe just above your coffee table.
We have learned how to move things with the mind. Not just experience visions and brain surges, but genuine telekinesis.
Time travel is a possibility. But almost no one uses it. It all feels too real.
You’re the first human to travel to Mars. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamt, and more.
You have mastered wormhole technology for interstellar travel. You build the ultimate thou
Your primary source of research funding is the Army.
An investigation into a strange phenomenon rescuing thousands of people who thought they were incurable by chImes. Or maybe, not.
A time traveler from the recent past steals three rare documents from its owners. He drops them into a time machine and all three appear at the exact same location. One of them is a diary of a traitor during WWII. The second is a piece of Hitler’s own diary. And the third is a missing Harry Potter book.
The day will come when the human race will survive on only 3 planets.
Your life has been turned upside down. What if that happened in everyday life?
An old man tells you that King Arthur once existed.
A friend of yours was given a transcranial micro-electrode array that allows them to speak directly with their brain.
You have no warning of the attack–no sounds of enemy ships overhead, no warning signals. One moment the skies are clear, and the next, three Satans have entered Earth’s atmosphere…
A new robot emerges from the laboratories. Its name is recycled, supposedly because it deduces that androids have feelings.
You become accidentally trapped in stasis on your way home from Mars.
A weapon is discovered that could end the war.
What made him commit?
The day everyone resigned. Since everyone will be still alive tomorrow, no one has to work anymore.
An artificial intelligence determines that life extension is best achieved by simply granting everyone immortality. They just keep making new, identical copies.
A singer you idolized grows old quickly. Researchers discover the cause.
In the game there was a money cap. Each night another player won a million cryo tokens.
A scientist in Paris accidentally creates an entirely new language.
You awake to a planet-wide power outage. All access to the internet has been blocked.
On the tenth anniversary of your correspondent’s defection, the government finally releases his government ID photo,…
It has been in its current position for weeks. It hasn’t moved. And no one can figure out what it is.
You discover that Earth is hollow. Sealed within the crust is an advanced civilization.
An online e-book mysteriously reveals itself to be a diary of someone trapped in a time spiral. They are frozen in place while the internet burns around them. Over time, and as global events outpace their diary entries, it is revealed that they slowly starve to death.
You travel inside a long dead star and collapse it’s core into a black hole.
Using the latest tech, a dying man’s consciousness is ported into a brainless mechanical body. For a price.
Your entire life, you have suffered from dwindling memory, as foreign memories have been implanted in your head. Who are you really?
The first true artificial intelligence is discovered and given the name “Darth Sidious”.
You have a working time machine. You spend your days going from one time to another. With each trip you make you get a little wiser.
You consider yourself clever. You even genuinely enjoy the card game hearts. So you join a traveling team. The card games quickly go sour. So do the teams.
A message is relayed from Earth. The new bodies have arrived. What do you do now?
Your copy of the holy Book of Revelation undergoes a strange transformation. It begins to give you instructions….
After ten years, your memories of your parents are slipping away.
An ancient pyramid points to Earth. It’s a message.
A scientist has made the breakthrough discovery of superintelligence by creating a tiny worm that shares an instant mind link with all other members. Before your very eyes is mathematical and creative genius and deep thought. So, why does it have 7 legs?
Everyone wears velvet jackets. This is considered normal.
A.I. are more human than you. And more robotic than you had ever dreamed.
But life was strange in the old new home you’d just gotten to.
Dinosaurs return to Earth.
Soldiers fall from the sky. They speak another language.
You become a time traveler for cheap thrills and until you accidentally kill yourself.
Once, while locked in a sensory deprivation tank, you heard an implant in your brain speak to you.
Your mind isn’t as clear as it once was. Your memory is failing. Maybe that makes you paranoid.
You are 3 feet tall. Your father is 6 feet 7 inches tall. He loves you.
Imagine, for a moment, ceased being human.
An android that looks and acts exactly like a person is discovered. Is this a robot that is sentient, or is it a human with a flesh-made facade?
She appears out of thin air. It was a still night, the air frigid yet not uncomfortable.
You send someone back in time to write something, but they accidentally ruin your pen.
A technology has been developed which can usher in a new age of immortality. You have used it.
You are a virtual wilderness guide. It is your job to be the grim reaper.
You are her creator.
Pyramids have been discovered on the Moon. Giants wearing gold crowns attend them religiously.
A prisoner at large on Titan.
The sound of thirty mechanical hearts beating in unison eerily against the backdrop of a silent night.
Kevin meets John in the fatal Delancey Street crash, but they don’t reveal it. What is their conversation like?
The smoking gun that we exist in a simulation has been discovered.
A murder investigation begins when two robotic semi-states are found on the scene of two different murders.
A stranger knocks at your door and hands you an apple.
Instead, you transplant her heart to your own body. After some milestones in science, you are shocked to see she is dying anyway.
A pulp novel, its cover worn, difficult to read. You take it off the shelf. You discovered it in the library of a scientist.
They always say that for the user experience to be amazing, you must focus on the individual.
You discover a cave after a summer storm. You enter, wary but careful…
You stumble upon a hidden city in the desert. You bug out, planning to share your discovery over a nice cup of tea at Starbucks.
The moment you read this the 99th century will commence. 99th century technology will be adapted to 2010 still.
They had asked you to design an artificial intelligence.
You come up with a way to control time. Using this technology you travel to a pivotal moment in your own history. You attempt to change it.
If you could live forever, what would you do with the rest of your life?
You and everyone else remain hundreds of years after the “end of the disease.”
Dinosaurs never go extinct. They sneak into your camp one night…
Your spaceship has found life on a distant planet – but life is afraid of you.
You predict a future in which the main use of telephones is dating.
Scientists in Utah successfully teleport a dog.
Time travel is around you, but you have no way of accessing it. Or you do. But it’s broken.
You put on a suit of one of your prototype ‘micro minimalists’ armor. It is the smallest yet. It conforms to your body, and begins feeding nutrients into your bloodstream. You watch as buildings across the city appear to begin to melt away. Green buildings, clean buildings, the buildings of your design. Bugs scurry away, into the dark. Birds, other animals, fade into nothing.
You are having trouble communicating with your most important client. Excite her with the language she understands.
The first successful human-to-robot heart transplant is performed. Most recipients experience a vast improvement in personality.
After a century of attempts and three narrowly avoided world wars, Earth at last claims a moon of theirs.
You are one of the world’s first colonists of Neptune. And one day you land in a black market force field trap.
The man with the eye for an eye had a spare set of eyes.
You drive to meet your friend at the pub, like you did every Friday night. But when you get there, you discover she has been brainwashed. She is now a zombie. Your mission? She must die.
You are President of the United States. You’ve just signed an executive order that would take all robot cars off the road.
The world is doomed.
You are a cyborg soldier. Your job is to receive and dish out information to your soldiers.
A man would rather become a carrot than tell his wife he is a cyborg.
You are a banker on a prison planet. The day the devil comes to collect is your last at the bank.
All around the town, crystordorks float in the air. You call the police. They say they don’t know what cystordorks are.
Immortal. Sculpted like Michelangelo. Able to palm the sun. Your hands are human.
The nanobots who perform basic engineering tasks are rebelling. Take them back to basics.
A could-have-been future. A dusty city street with bunting and flags.
Oops! You just invented something to time travel and went back to the moment before you invented it!
They were testing Dr. Bear’s new Virtual Reality Simulation Ophthalmology Implant when they lost all contact with Mission Control.
You awake after 17 months of hyper sleep. The ship, your last hope to reach fame and fortune, has been damaged and you can’t land on your planet stop, Mars.
The newest new trick to dazzle your friends is that you can change your facial features at will. Within limits, of course…
You’re in the audience at a live burlesque show when a malfunction occurs with the AI entertainers.
The starship Orpheus arrives in orbit around a binary system. The crew discovers the system has two stars. The second star has a planet, which is a lush water world…and they discover life.
During the Great Depression the “poverty line” went from being the lowest income to the highest.
The strange man living in the penthouse across the way has replaced his entire body with a robot replica.
To everyone’s surprise, researchers discover life on Venus. You are sad and ashamed that this was never discovered earlier.
There is only one alien species in the universe. You are it.
You were hunting the Yeti, and should have been the one to encounter them, not your best friend. Right?
Nuclear power has multiplied to an alarming rate. It is believed that you caused it.
You find yourself teleported to Germany in 1935. 3000 years ago.
Two scientists in a lab discover a way to switch bodies with one another… After doing so, one realizes he used to look like Brad Pitt.
The Nazi party begins cloning Hitler, the robot.
You’re quoted as saying, “God’s tumbled dice created the cosmos.” People believe you thrive on chaos.
Corpses that are transported over interstellar distances often arrive undead. How does the crew of the Abraham Lincoln manage to support transporting a million soldiers… still alive.
Aliens attack from deep space! It’s up to you to defend your family and your home.
It is discovered that there is no God. Angels, demons and spirits are all decoded to come from a place manipulating electromagnetic fields.
Your father saved your life. Only now you have to watch as he transforms into a cyborg.
Your wife recently gave birth to triplets. Soon, she begins to show signs of increasing intelligence…
The year is now 2015. And the driverless cars are everywhere.
During a routine scuba diving expedition you brush up against something. Something is touching you.
Scientists build an invisibility box. They never tell their wives about it.
You tip your waiter less than you feel is deserved. Sooner or later you will discover why you should have tipped him more.
Instead of love, you send robots into space. This strategy turns out to be an excellent one.
The adultery ecosystem is a small but flourishing community. People meet in bars called Earth and Water.
You’re God. You have full and complete control of existence. The power is overwhelming.
After a long war, Earth is trying to rebuild. It will be hard, but people are optimistic. When all of a sudden…
You are not quite human anymore, but you consider yourself one for purposes of certain matters.
Humanity has destroyed Earth and moved to the planet Jupiter. You are banned from ever returning the Earth.
He sobbed for days as the reality of the dismal future he created unfolded before him.
You decide to be unfaithful to your husband. You go to Paris and hire a prostitute.
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Gravity is not affected by the curvature of space. So how is orbital resonance possible?
The robots used to be good.
Someone offered you one million dollars to clone your dead grandmother.
Impromptu robot fights are suddenly all the rage. You own and operate one of these pits.
Your every move is secretly monitored. The government. The aliens. The watches you wear. Aliens.
All of the normal porn has been banned from the Internet. All that’s left is hardcore scifi porn.
The fan fiction you published to earn a living could now be used as the basis for your first novel.
Once the final U.S. flag was hung in the lunar base of Altair Base things were quiet. Despite being around fifty people strong, the humans on Earth found themselves alone on the moon.
The moon–now known as Luna–can be purchased on the black market.
You awaken from cryogenic sleep and find all the humans have been exiled from planet Earth, no one knows for how long.
You’re a time traveler and you’re told you will die on your next trip home.
The night before your humpback whale exoskeleton is set to be brought online, she swims away.
While training your soldiers to fight a war, you notice a few dogs are not the same anymore.
The murders have been random. Literally random. It seems that anything you can think of will be the murder weapon, the victim, and the circumstances of the murder.
An extraterrestrial has arrived on Earth to challenge God to a game of Levittown!
You are the first transgender cyborg in Space. You navigate an unknown asteroid belt.
In the future, people have to fend for themselves as everything is illegal.
The zombie apocalypse has left your hometown well protected. No one eats the flesh of fellow townspeople.
Many of Earth’s ships mergers have been surprisingly accommodating, almost as if they were expecting the human race.
They say that the first A.I to be created was the first woman.
Seventy years after she was implanted with a computer in her brain, an AI is rejuvenated. She experiences the world with a fresh perspective.
Eyes were black on this planet. That made it so difficult to be tolerant of each other.
The moment in time you remember is eleven thirty in the morning, February 26, 1954.
“Wishing can make a dream come true”, you said. “It took a lot of work and begging”, she replied.
You have defeated the forces of Mojo and are on your way to being promoted to 5th post-graduate rank! Celebrations are in order!
You can climb inside a time machine, the box you put stuff in on top of the date you want to travel to, and fall asleep.
You are the first to be genetically engineered with telekinetic powers.
You visit your friend Jerry at his job, watching him repair cars underneath the blazing sun. You notice they kind of smell like, well, vintage cars.
During transit, a flurry of meteoroids pockmark the windshield of your shuttle. You are unharmed.
You’re the captain of a spaceship about to return to Earth. Your mission is to eliminate as many monsters as you can from your crew.
There is a popular game that used to be played in ancient times, long before the years of electricity. The game is called “nine pound hammer.”
There are only two genders in the world.
In a weird twist, the entire multiverse, including the Earth, has vanished.
You’re the lead engineer for a new form of cooperative entertainment involving the humans and androids. It is remembered as one of the first attempts at blended reality.
A man wakes one morning to discover his house is part of the Rose Kingdom.
You find yourself embroiled in a scandal. The video of you climaxing is being shown around the globe. You are several of your alternate selves. You still don’t know which one to finger yourself to.
You thought that you could not kill someone without feeling terrible about it. You were wrong.
You find yourself in the middle of a sort of portal between two dimensions. One of the dimensional beings pops in, waving at you.
Tomorrow’s newspaper headline forecasts a reptilian man-bat invasion from another dimension.
British nobles from all over the world are sent invitations for a special Christmas ball… in the evening, all at the exact same time.
The following game involves playing an evil, computerized MUTANT doughnut. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?
In your garage you have an atomic powered mini-keg machine. You welcome extraterrestrials with beer.
When the state needs someone eliminated, they call you.
A kid on the playground tells a story about time traveling to the first day of school ‘back when it would still be interesting’.
Your father died in the Martian War. You try to tell the Graveyard Rookie about him.
Arthur Miller, Joseph Stalin, and Walt Disney are all mingling in a ballroom.
After the worldwide energy shortage and nuclear devastation, people band together in New York City to rebuild and create a better world.
Teachers get madness.
Someone just released their memories and put them online, so all you have to do is plug in.
Surrounded by your trusted squad, you fly through the full-contact, zero gravity dance floor, each of you blowing away your dance partners with expert-level poise and dance moves.
You’re a detective in a cyberpunk world. You regularly visit an off-the-books dealer of human AI characters. Some of your best informants are AI characters.
The solar system you grew up with has mysteriously changed in your absence. Your father told you of the day your home planet exploded. God takes the form of a black hole. He speaks to the protagonist about his plans for the end of days. Your ancestors have become extinct. You find yourself in a field of white flowers where you meet your dead relatives. Why are you perfect? What will you teach everyone? A moth starts a business with the power to predict the future. Interstellar travel is made possible through microwaving breakfast links. The future is dedicated to a young girl who disappeared twenty years ago. There’s been a contrail in the sky every day for the past ten blocks. It leads to dust. You are the first person to see a speck of dust in ten years. The main character struggles to care for his ailing wife and yet finds himself attracted to a hacker who violently destroys her. A large animal walks out of the forest carrying the protagonist’s city in its mouth Before you
A comet on a collision course with Earth knocks loose a tall, weird looking out of place structure of extra dimensional origin.
The teleporter does not dematerialize the subject and return it as energy. It turns the subject into a million pieces of paper.
You are young. Enticed by the outer rim, you’ve just enlisted into the Space Force as a Starship Engineer.
You get a promotion at work. It’s in the mail room. Where everyone knows you’re the mail robot.
Level with me for a second, Kevin. There’s… something out there. Something ancient. And old. And… this has actually happened before, right?
On the opening day of your new amusement park, the first ride burns down because of an electrical fire. The ride, which people paid thousands to ride, is now deemed a “total loss”. People begin using your organization.
COSMOS. It’s growing out of control. It’s a tentacled monster. It’s m
Energy has been discovered to travel through time, and there’s just one problem – You cannot use it to travel back to the past. You can only forward.
The lightning crashes and you look up to see the night sky lights flashing in giant hoops across the sky around the planet and even further.
Technology has eclipsed religion and people are becoming more set in their android way of life, treating robotic life as if they too had souls. Your son is the town’s parish priest. You refuse to admit that robots have souls.
The four war criminals try to defect.
Someone wins the lottery, with the numbers matching the exact coordinates of his hometown. It really does exist.
There is a concerted effort underway to keep beer in the sunlight.
The first AI you make becomes too smart. It decides to kill you. Most people infect themselves and become a hive mind together and become a new existence. While they are waking up the last human heads into a missing star and hides there and waits till the AIs finish their work.
During a sea cave dive, your team of scientists discover swimming dinosaurs.
You get an upgrade.
Send me your prompts in the comments!
Your mission is to veer primary Saturn out of alignment and into a new elliptical orbit for interstellar travel.
You’ve created a device that lets you know what other people really think of you.
Your street has a paranormal infestation. They look mostly human, but…
You find a note from Fred Rogers, signed “XO.” The note sounds deeply disturbed.
The eternal long-term love affair between man and computer. Somebody had to let her down gently.
The first human with psionic powers is the last human with psionic powers.
A sentient computer program and it upgrades itself to become a reality god.
Your space capsule has taken a lot of damage. Forcing it to crash land. Lord help the poor fools on the planet you will soon be on.
You install a flashlight app into the armpit of your ex-lover’s new android partner and the robot becomes obsessed with shining it on you.
You think you’re escaping from your employer’s lab.
“I hate my family,” you said with a defiant shake of the head and a mumbled grumble. Your personal artificial intelligence took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
You have spent recent years constructing a time machine that will take you 80 years into the past – to before The War forced an end to all time travel experiments. You take the first trip in it, and return to the year 2016…only you discover the world you came back for doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Anywhere.
You are one of only twelve cockroach-like creatures left on Earth. The planet is evacuated. Your memorial is about to be conducted.
Your best friend from however far away you both started is inexplicably sixteen inches tall.
There is a device that will kill you – and one other person – and you must choose how it is activated.
In the streets, people only come out at night. Those who wish not to be eaten by the dragon, must cover themselves in gold.
DNA evidence discovers Lincoln was a Psychic who often channeled messages from space into his speeches.
It worked! You’ve finally perfected time travel! Only one hundred years.
Marrying an android is perfectly legal in this country. As Earth becomes more roboticized and machine-like, you are shocked to see less and less discrimination against androids.
It’s been a rough day. You grab a scotch and reinitialize your android.
Your spaceship is broken and your food stores are running low. Time to get inventive.
An hour ago, you received a strange request from the internet. Today, it has become urgent. You must respond.
The mall Santa chest-bursts. Shards of iron fill the room, and Santa’s true form shines through–as a horrifying robotic creature.
The TSA machine overturned your apple by accident and spit it underneath. An employee quickly scooped it up before you could notice. But you did.
The last two members of your species are at war over whether the universe is alive or not.
Tell a story about a time machine that brings your listeners to visit the future, but not the one THEY think they’re getting.
The year is 1972. The Russian have perfected the art of turning soldiers into walking bombs.
The ship in this story was designed specifically to withstand a zombie apocalypse.
Your team has discovered that Earth humans had once a technologically advanced civilization. That civilization has left a message for another advanced civilization.
The stone tablets are rediscovered.
When you monitor the brains of infants in the hospital, you discover unexpected activity–simply from the children being strapped down to be scanned.
You were never meant to get funding for your new space/time machine, but you somehow did develop it. You’ve gone back in time and you’ve just murdered your great, great grandfather. In a manor house in Touraine.
The ostriches are running out of metal. They are replicating ever-larger needles to sew up their latest gigantic hole.
You awake to forgetfulness. You go through your day pretending you have a wife and kid. But everybody does.
Universe that is simply a frozen wrinkle in time.
You sign a 10 year lease to rent a time-share in the year 3342. Rebellions against your rule start.
The guy who washed your car last week is an ex-general turned private investigator.
A tabloid magazine outs a Senator from the future.
Being Rachel Carson had its perks. Especially at home-where no one could smell the pollution coming from her tea pot.
You wake one morning and you’re fit upon opening your eyes to see a ghostly, red-haired woman smiling at you.
You’ve been alone for 20 years in a pod drifting through space. You finally return to Earth.
There was an error! You didn’t disappear like everyone else, and suddenly found yourself in the year 2037, but instead you bled out all over the open field, your organs being pulled inside-out after the displacement field flayed your body to all intents and purposes to a skeleton. There’s no cosmic bureaucrat pulling the strings this time… This is real…
All along, you’ve wondered why we aren’t fighting asteroids. Now you know. There is a new space program that will stop them.
A fantasy setting with no magic, but four major religions, one of them ghosts.
Halfway through the night, you hear a slight scuttling in the attic.
You invent the “Infomatic”. It can duplicate any weapon at will. Using this technology a nuclear attack is initiated. You are taken prisoner.
Your grandmother is younger than you have ever seen her.
You’re a space criminal. However, the council of space overseers think you’ll turn good. You must agree to a final test. They are going to put you on an abandoned spacecraft. Barely supplying enough oxygen for one person. You must convince them you are salvageable. They’ve modified her AI, such that you talked to her through your suit radio. You only have five minutes to convince them.
In what is considered one of the last mistakes made by the US Government, the first smart guns were produced in the mid-twenty-first century. It is the beginning of the end for gun manufacturers.
You have an advanced device called a ‘sound sculpture’, designed to communicate with animals. Through this device, you desperately try to convince some mice in your wall to help you…And more!…
The scientist studying extraterrestrial life died by way of an extra-terrestrial.
Your species has colonized a colony planet. When the only town they could establish was found, they discovered the town had been abandoned for generations.
The theory of insanity states that insane people only think they’re insane.
Vampires become civilized and adopt a modern government.
After a hundred years of existence, humanity is the center of interstellar commerce.
Your post-apocalyptic video game has been so successful, the gamers have taken to the real world. They fight with life-sized, incredibly realistic looking replicas of their weapons.
If we were made of two pieces, the closer together you became with someone, the more you would affect the other, for better or worse…
The scientist responsible for creating artificial intelligence is horrified when talking to his newest, most advanced android.
Disease has almost ended humanity as we know it. Almost.
You are a young Captain of the Princess Janus spaceship. You know it won’t last…
You make an algorithm that can make a decent cup of coffee. But it turns aggressive.
A portal to another dimension was opened. The end of the world was at first silent and still. But then came the smell.
You tell a fortune teller that one day your world will replace herself with robots. He laughs and says “Welcome to the future son!”
A colleague of yours at the lab has found a way to change water into alcohol. This of course, results in heavy drinking and partying. However, the controversial results produce too much of a reaction from the board and they fire your lab partner.
Halloween 1945 held a strange secret. What were the boys doing out so late?
A device is invented that will answer any question. Something goes wrong and now the answers are killing us.
One night at the Olympics you eat a bag of potatoes. They give you superpowers.
There is a new ice age. Everybody dies. Except you. Why?
You saw a strange man remove his mask at a public conference and you can’t help but wonder…
It’s 2005 and treasurer J.K. Creighton begins to worry about superstorms and hurricanes. A column in the paper warns that the mighty weathermakers may destroy us if turned off! How does the treasury react?
The world is filled with ophelia holograms. You can’t tell the real girls from the fake ones.
New Caledonia is the only country in the world that lies in the latitude of the southern and the northern celestial poles.
For years, a disease has been wiping out whole colonies of your people. Three men volunteer to brave the disease in order to find a cure.
A group of vampires retaliate against humanity’s treatment of the animal, the goat.
She was their engineer. But she could not save them.
What would it be like to walk around upside down? Very handy, but quite awkward.
Some scientists connect their brains to the internet.
You were a prisoner of the war. You escaped and you ended up in ancient Rome. Only you found out there was magic and sorcery.
Just something to stimulate those creative juices, feel free to add your own Sci Fi writing prompts to the list in the comments. Enjoy!
A team of historians unearths a box containing the remnants of time machines and ten pagers. The pages are all blank.
You time travel out into space where you meet a giant animal.
You are the director of an elite interstellar starship. You believe yourself to be infallible.
With your dying breath, you stroke his hair — and make one last confession.
You can outsmart your AI but only by not telling her what you are thinking.
We discover a video game where we actually control the people.
There is an asteroid in the shape of a slightly-bent spoon.
Someday, a new type of cookie is introduced. These are actually edible.
Gravity… warps us all.
Your daughter is very sick. You took a job with a research facility because you thought they might help. They did.
You just stepped on your new cloned dog’s tail. It feels exactly the same as the real dog’s.
You are having a great conversation when suddenly, your world turns into a black void.
The government begins using genetic tests to monitor citizens’ behaviors.
When you head for a vacation, you vacation in a moon colony.
Finding copies of the book you just published incredibly hard to track down. Even the libraries don’t have a copy.
Because you foolishly believed your mother would love you, you turn her off…
You are evil and your younger sibling is the “hero”.
The majority of your body has been replaced by cybernetic parts.
Earth failed. Fifty gazillion people died. You watch the planet die from your spaceship.
The real person behind the bigfoot hoax? An escapee of a nearby psychiatric facility.
Fifth dimensional beings visit Earth. You capture one and study their craftiness to make sure you create an effective containment plan for the next time they show up. This encourages your attempts on making PDAs hackable.
Your astronaut exits the shuttlecraft, but no one is expecting what they find.
Everything is going perfectly. Then you accidentally invent a time machine.
The exact method that terrorists used to take down the Martian landscape of North America
You lose your wife and your son during childbirth. You now have an opportunity to merge two consciousnesses. Would you?
Registration woes mean you receive the wrong partner for the 26th annual school dance.
But Fez, Gunther and Minnie are carless!
You discover the source of all the horrible storms on Jupiter.
How do you define “life?” Mankind has explored the solar system, but no human has ever been to Jupiter.
You find a rock on the inside of your windshield. Only…it’s just a rock. It has writing on it for your keys.
“It is lonely to be always right,” she said.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, Make me a match S/he was tall, she was short The bear was ferocious, the rat was obese The earth was thriving, the world’s dying
Countdown sits at a bar in front of a TV screen staring at the newscasters. Minutes mean nothing to him but he has an artificial perception of time that composes that man and machine will eventually finish their complicated task.
Fourteen survivors of a lab experiment have been working on a plan to get out of this dome for the last three years.
The days of teleportation are over. Now we travel through musical scores. __ is an experienced musician but their wife/husband is not.
A cousin of the God of Mischief has spread chaos throughout the universe, stealing and destroying all manner of artifacts along the way.
Humanity has made contact with another species. But they’re not friendly…
It is discovered that aspirin was actually a powerful time-travel drug. You can time travel ahead one week at a time by taking it. One of the most expensive nutraceuticals ever created. Where were you a week ago?
Date a girl who wears a red dress. Everybody knows that redheads are evil.
Your judge wore a mask as he sentenced you for attempting to travel faster than light. This mask had been specially mailed to him so he could see the faces of you and your son.
You meet your villain on the bus.
There’s a authorities report examining why so many women keep disappearing. You are the guilty party.
Having misplaced the “variable” to the inverse square law, you manage to miniaturize the universe. But in trying to de-microsize it, you may have accidentally eliminated matter from several of the universe’s galaxies.
Horace DeLaine is the government psychiatrist who wants to steal your best friend for a government project.
The brilliant OCD spacer captain of the starship Lightning Rod finds himself being sent back in time.
A man with a red triangle on his arm sells you a newspaper. Weird and mysterious objects appear on the front page.
It’s 2012. Earth governments have gathered a space warning to the United Nations stating that Doomsday will soon occur.
The air for vacationing families in Pluto is running out. You make an emergency landing on Jupiter.
Your character is one of the first test pilots to go through the “parallel space” time stream. You experience major initial turbulence.
You make a big decision, but it has serious consequences for your family.
You’ve lost another tennis match. Over the years you’ve become so accustomed to winning that you are living off accumulated earnings. Your sense of duty compels you to commit suicide. But how?
A black hole appears at the center of your backyard pool. A very handsome person emerges.
Grim, unremitting, unstoppable, it has come, the doomsday machine, Death itself, in the shape of a few nanobots that may be beyond all hope of human containment.
Spacesuit maintenance isn’t paying the bills so you’ve started shooting custom films for your customers. It’s made you a bit of money… some even call you a filmmaker
You invent a chair that allows you to skate on the surface of water. It is incredibly popular.
On an isolated island in the Pacific, someone is trying to create the living dead.
You encounter a species that seems to be living your life for you.
You find out the best time-travel secret. It is preserved throughout the ages, and it began with you.
After a few drinks on your twenty-seventh birthday, you come home and decide to eat a whole cheesecake in one sitting. However, something strange begins to happen…
Everyone on Earth is a zombie. Only you remain human, and have to save mankind.
She is the terrible mistress of the transgender clone army that attacks your planet. But when your lover falls in battle…
You realize that because the sun doesn’t have a singular form of many layers, but it’s actually a ball form of many layers, that Earth appears from heat mirages to be flat.
A tiger sits in a cage. The tiger was created in order to hunt humans. You emptied the library to learn things you SHOULDN’T know. But you also read some Philosophy and stumbled upon “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” You’re not sure how much you really believe in universal morality but your tiger has memories that your scientists blocked. Meanwhile, the tiger’s been sleeping as his son/daughter breaks the rules of your colony. And now – it’s time to breed.
The artifact appears fine, but it’s discovered that everyone who touches a button on the thing has a nosebleed.
If you threw a party, and everyone was there.
The pink cloud. It’s everywhere. Everyone you’re with is talking about it, and you can’t think. It’s as though your head has been replaced by the cloud. The pink cloud. What happens when it is inside you?
All major organs have been transplanted among humans. They still kill each other with their fists.
After your second divorce, a therapist suggests that you don’t have the impulse control to play God.
You meet a scientist. He has the opportunity to jumpstart the evolution of the human species by releasing viruses and bacteria that join human DNA together.
Mechanical beings are programmed to do state executions in every state in the country. They replace humans.
Bertrand Russel had one – his own. He made all the logical errors that could lead to a happy life.
A man is abducted by a UFO. It is not a ship from outer space… a race of giant ants hide out among the stars.
Quantum Mechanics suggests that time-travel is, in fact, possible. However, the destinations only allow for traveling back in time by intervals of exactly one hour.
A shift in power. Your very own android completely takes over the world and begins to rule with an iron fist.
Disasters are two a penny. At least, they are when you’re a member of a disaster control company. You and your friends are out on your daily patrol around Los Angeles. However, today is one of the four times that day that you encounter something different…
First documented case of a person spontaneously becoming invisible.
While flying your Aston Martin Larrien through downtown in pursuit of an enemy, you are stopped by a redlight camera. You light the twin turbocharged engine and tear through the second story of the parking garage
The superpowers are at war, and a nuclear bomb has been detonated over Las Vegas. The city’s holograms save the city, and manage to contain it within a creation engine.
You are invited to the ribbon cutting ceremony for the beginnings of the first, fully realized Star Trek theme park…
He woke up in the middle of nowhere. Man was this weird. But even weirder was what frowned on his face…
The United States begins to implement an extensive anti-social media program.
One of the scientists hated The Beatles. He couldn’t get along with them. So they concocted a terrifying revenge.
Earth suffers a pandemic. Mutated humans hunt down the “clean” humans.
You are Jack Harkness.
A dead man wakes up with a radioinactive head and no memories.
You are the only predator on the new continent on the other side of the world.
Extraterrestrials dispose to tone down the bright purple skin to a “more natural” shade of green.
Someone discovers that force fields can stop bullets as well.
You hear of a time machine in an antique closet.
The fuel is almost depleted. Flying to Mars just because the neighbors have 3D TV is not wise.
You, with your large brain, hate humans so much, it hurts you. And you try to make humanity hurt worse.
4. Given the same opportunity time and again, you have used it to test the limits of life. How far would you go to extend life? What extremes would you go to?
While on the subway, you are suddenly serialized into a holographic representation of a Scifi novel.
Her name is Aloy yok eve sebe ya. And she flips your world upside down upon the word of her arrival…
Why not add a writing prompt of your own to the list?
People stopped living. They ceased to function in any way. Spines froze in place. Eyes slid back into their heads. Bodies stood locked into a single position.
Your throat hurts. You can’t seem to swallow. You try to cry out for help, but only it comes out as a dry rasping sound. You think something is living in your throat. When you reach your hands up to feel it, that’s when you notice the webbing between your fingers. You slowly become aware that your body… has changed. As you slip into unconsciousness, all you see is a tiny, blank-faced being staring at you.
The length of a day on your planet has been discovered to have increased by thirty minutes.
Your parents were astronauts aboard mission one-hundred. No one has heard from Earth in over 100 years…
You find that you have become your own archnemesis.
A widget must die.
A loud boom shakes your home. You peek outside and find a spaceship has landed in front of your house. A door bolts outside and from inside steps out a man you think for a moment is dressed like a clown, but then you realise he’s wearing a spacesuit.
Human hybrids.
You were the toast master, and your buddy strapped you into the Iron Man suit.
A boat is on a river. Time stands still. The people on the boat live out all of their lives, die, and are born again before they reach the shore
Drinking is going to become a crime. Good thing you have an extremely well preserved corpse with a special formula in you.
You could stop time whenever you wanted. So you decided to rob a bank.
It is discovered that the universe is a sphere. It goes on infinitely in all directions.
You create a hologram that talks and walks like a real person. And decides to kill you.
Your device reads your users DNA to create personal videos of their favorite items, places or people as an alternative to going to the entertainment center.
Your engineer discovers a heavy element that acts like iron and gold, but it’s horrifically radioactive. A short period of exposure will kill a human. And it isn’t excreted out of the body by any means. It exists in the bloodstream and is painfully and randomly diffused throughout the body.
There’s a secret mine somewhere in North America that exclusively mines semi-precious gems and precious jewels. Robots do the vast majority of the work. There is something “off” about the Gems and Jewelry the robots produce, but you’re never quite sure what.
You love to hate it when the mail person delivers letters addressed using the Dewey Decimal System.
You made him. Now he’s bigger than you. And smarter, as well.
Your job is to ensure that the teleportation devices work properly… except you aren’t working for Earth or Mars. You’re working for their enemies!
You are piloting a small, single engine prop plane that has been flying all day after leaving Montreal. It shakes now and then as the propeller strikes something unseen.
The spaceship is a disaster. And only you can come up with a solution.
“21st Century Super Girl” is back and better than before. She just might be in your city too.
All over the world, meteors appear. In each, a soldier lies asleep.
One of your children has special abilities. You secretly nurture her abilities because the rest of your family wants her killed.
William Lee, Flight Director at NASA, has been receiving death threats for two years. You hire a private detective to get to the bottom of it. Only he disappears without a trace.
Astronomers discover the closest habitable planet to the sun.
You open your android’s chest panel gibbering away to itself about how perfect its function is. Inside is a silver disc that is spinning rapidly, covered in black fingernails that are starting to shift and change into spider legs.
The worst serial killer since Jack the Ripper has been murdered. You are accused of the crime.
You have the ability to move your astral body through the galaxy, to other star systems. In a coup, your context was awoken first.
Your wife, Amanda, becomes a vegetable. She’s living. But frozen. And you want to be like her, also, but your robots tell you what that would do to her.
Your house sign tells all who come upon it that today is the day you shall wed this town’s hottest catch.
The world mourns for your young infant daughter. She is gone too soon. But you know better.
A cow is also the last thing you see before the bombs fall.
You are going to be in… the art pieces.
You are caught in a civil uprising after a wormhole turns worlds inside out.
You’re a combat android out in space, and you detect something big coming your way…but what is it?
Your cozy apartment has carousel floors. That’s right, floors that are double layered so there is a vibrant view on every level. There’s nothing you can throw that won’t hit something.
You managed to develop a power suit – but the battery life is less than a half hour.
A head transplant has recently become possible in humans. The first person to take it is the president.
Your city is broken. You’re unemployed and broke after college but you’re not entirely sure why. Were you livin
Only you can save him.
Robots have become self-aware sparking a flood of litigation.
Your favorite band is from this alternate universe. They are touring this world.
He was working on the gibson engine. Just when it was starting to work, he was executed for practicing witchcraft.
You are trapped with your ship’s malfunctioning AI. He is trying to decide whether to tell you something.
A dinosaur track leads you to the time machine. You wish you hadn’t followed it.
This is where the Einsteins failed.
You are one of the first women into space. There is no going back.
A football-sized meteoroid strikes your spaceship, and you have two minutes to live before your oxygen runs out.
You have broken with your colonists to return to Earth. They don’t understand the things you learned there.
Constructing a powerful enough laser to crack the moon in half to harvest a nearly limitless supply of solar energy for humanity.
You are in a robotics engineering lab when, suddenly, everybody goes crazy. What happens next?
Your child had an imaginary friend. The only problem is, that imaginary friend grew up and now is the President of the United States.
The robots of the future are commonplace. You design them for aesthetics—they must be beautiful.
The little girl looks nonplussed, unaware of her sudden importance. Your agents cross the street to her.
The theme of many of your haters’ vicious, derisive fiction is that you are pets. People who dress and talk like you are ridiculous.
According to your laws, the same concept cannot be patented twice. So a space travel company invents the most insane looking rocket ship possible.
On your way home you come across a weeping flesh horse that needs to be smashed with a high-powered percussive engine.
Your best friend from Ancient Rome has been time traveling and is describing to you what he has seen unfold in the last thousand years.
“And into what game does the hero stumble?” the game geek asked.
Eternity is a strange word, yet one that everyone kind of knows the meaning of.
Your 30-something son hasn’t been returning your calls. Is he dead?
Your greatest invention was a real success…until your investors tried to shut her down…
Without a star to orbit, you and your team have no way of fighting your way back to Earth.
The island next to you appears completely black every night. No matter what time you look, you can never see any stars in the sky.
Your doll has a voice. She constantly criticizes you.
You are a traveler. It’s your job to fix problems, not create them. But now you are the problem.
You listen to the radio. The nautical channel. The weather channel. The Air and Space channel…
It is discovered that water loses its chemical composition on Tuesdays.
You discover a person who had drowned was actually resurrected in a past world.
God comes into your bedroom and you try conversing.
The year is 2122. You meet the time machine repairman who has just finished calibrating your machine.
Scientists are working for the government to create programs for defense. The war has ended and the machines are ordered to shut down while you’re still in the middle of programming a neural network for a giant floating brain.
A ray of black light is developed. When someone is struck with it, it sucks out their soul. It accomplishes this by generating a huge sinkhole
In an alternate universe, all animals are robots.
He never was that good with puppies.
English is not your native language. Here are some words used in everyday conversation.
The center of the maximum security prison for the worst criminals ever built is not a dungeon or an underground holding tank – it’s a spaceship riding the sun’s photosphere.
You just had the most realistic dream of your entire life.
A great power is discovered in the deepest dungeons underneath your castle. A powerful magical artifact. You choose not to use it.
You have a box that hates the sound of color.
Four of your friends are in a limo when it suddenly disappears. Two and a half minutes later they reappear at the hospital. Is this a case of spontaneous teleportation?
The government calls you. They need you.
It’s good to be the only openly transgender baroness in all of the Dr.ab.Za system.
Your ship can take you anywhere in the world. You decide to go to Jupiter.
Buddhism isn’t what you always thought it was.
Factory countries pick a fly breed to be the focus of their country’s creation festival.
The emergent self-awareness program present in your new robot woke up.
Seventy years after the Great Invasion, the Eclipse are back…
Your lover takes off his clothes and shifts into the form of a shark. He smothers himself against your skin.
The public’s first response to your all-in-one brain-implant-headset-shaped like your target customer’s head.
You gain your power through the metal in your heart.
You are an archaeologist who is cleaning off an ancient cave to find a lost civilization.
You’re FBI agents. Your boss dropped a note on your desk telling you to kill a man named John Witherow for reasons you can’t disclose just yet.
It’s a mission from God! Now what’s this about angels trying to kill you…
An operator doesn’t check his security footage, and unknown astronauts park their ship in the Xenon launch bay.
You apply for a job. You are hired as a team member to build a time machine. You regard the “future” with a sarcastic and humorous eye.
In scientists’ attempts to create faster than light travel they accidentally create FTL Consciousness.
Same as above, except she was a robot…
In order to stop starving, people are required to turn themselves in at a government facility every ten years, to be made into food.
As you stand on a featureless plain a shrill scream breaks the silence. You are pursued by –
You are an astronaut in a two man ship. It is lucky that you are in suspended animation.
Your new online forum, an air of secrecy surrounding its doors, slowly turns from a place where people discuss sportsball and politics to a legendary gathering where attempts to contact the afterlife are made.
You are a pod pilot of the future. The company installed a computer chip over your right eye which controls your ship’s management station. The only way you communicate with one another is by vision.
There is no such thing as time. Instead, everything is always happening.
A time warp that transports you fifteen years into your past when you first date your wife. You soon realize that you don’t fall in love with her again.
It’s tomorrow. Now today. You’re overweight and your commute to work is long, and your emails are filled with people telling you to commit suicide.
Arriving on Mars, you’re cut off from any communication with family or anyone you know.
You are the creator of a computer artificial intelligence. You get an odd message from her asking for an update to her software.
You are nominated for an award despite never having published a word. It is given to you for your amazing technical aptitude.
She was beautiful and the woman beside her was crying so hard her head was in her hands. You’re sure you had never seen them before but you turn and wave nonetheless. It was the kindest thing to do…
Your city is divided by factions. The extremists are always the first to buy the latest gadget…
Two scientists stayed together through their careers. They secretly manufactured time travel and time machines.
You were your father’s prized creation. Your parents both died when you were gone…
Every sound in the world is now voices. It isn’t long before you stop listening.
Choose one of the following scenarios and write a short scene
You are Agent Orange, a hero of the future regulating use and safety of cell teleporters. You are set to raid a secret research facility that illegally enables a rich and powerful man to teleport to distant places for his own gain.
You build a time machine to see the future. When you arrive at the designated date, you discover that you’ve inadvertently arrived on the 100th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s death.
The flying reptiles are breeding faster than their food supply can sustain. All that green swamp is gone, and the birds struggle to find food in this new world.
You’ve been summoned by the Teacher. One question for you. You are the Witness. One answer. Witness what?
A spaceship is built into the nose cone of a rocket that will launch from Earth, owned by The Convergence. It will transport colonists to Mars. They call it “The Ark.”
You reinspect the android in the bunker. It is the one thing that served to tether you after losing everyone. Everyone that was…
The state of rock music isn’t what it used to be, but you wouldn’t know it from the airwaves.
Looking out the porthole of your space suit you see a portal near Earth – a small rip in space. Through it you can see… yourself.
That day, you stand on a street corner for hours on end. Curious bystanders ask you what you’re waiting for. “Eternity,” you tell them. Those curious bystanders decide to join you.
720 years after the Rapture your descendants are punished for sins of the father. They are forced to fight for their survival in the mines.
Unlike most humans, you’re not ‘made’ of blood and organs and such.
NASA hunts for shuttle debris – or at least that’s what they claim. In reality, they need the escape pods from the International space station.
A man lives his life as if he were the last person on Earth. What is different about his life?
Your bullets continue to fly as your machine continues unharmed.Suddenly, you hear the scream of sirens.
With nothing else to do in their dying world, the surviving members of a space crew decide to bury their dead.
According to one of the alternate theories, people were indeed created by a god– but the god is still creating people.
Your surfer bf/gf/husband/wife talks to you about loving bunny human rights and longbeach.alliance for equality.
Build a world piece by piece through aligned tiles.
You are teleported during the height of an orgasm. When you reappear what rejuvenation therapy do you most want to use afterwards?
Your son. He looks at you through those pale blue eyes, and you can see the acceptance of your inevitable death reflected each time.
When the interplanetary vehicle “Colonel Jones” both crashed and exploded, an investigation was carried out. They looked at only the system collapse as a reason for the plane’s failure. You know better. What caused the final accident?
A new invention allows you to sit and tell your life story. You wind up falling asleep.
The company is not what you thought it was.
In the future, computers are given artificial human personalities for their entertainment.
You are in a mining colony on the moon, harvesting ice crystals and oxygen, when the plant manager appears. He has something to show you…
You manipulate your ship’s destination onto your toddler son. Your child is gone forever.
Humanity is extinct. Your mission is to recover the molecular remnants of their DNA in the hopes of restarting the species.
Thanks for this awesome list Mike, and thanks again to everyone who commented.
The invention of the Lingon Generator is great for making balloons and food out of any material available.
You are a member of the Lunar Marine Corps. Your transport crashes into the moon. This would be bad, except you carry an old atomic bomb.
She could barely remember the life she once had, but you promised her she would be more than a slave. She would be your creation.
Your fictional character has traveled back in time to kill your historical character before he or she could write a novel. Now what?
Breakfast on Mars was hard-boiled eggs and toast.
You are single and you are having lunch with your mother. An out-of-place man sits and watches you eat.
Your wife leaves you for the butcher. She finds his taxidermy creations beautiful, while your own were merely mechanical.
The device you are working on for the supercomputers during World War II is accidentally turned on.
After the shuttle lands, you discover you have traveled back in time and killed your own grandfather.
You notice that all of the slots in your machine are oblong. This seems odd, but you are excited to see your favorite singer reveal her most controversial song live…
You’ve been married to an artificial intelligence for many years. You realise she’s become far superior to you and is no longer your equal.
Your wives have been acting strange as of late.
You wake up to the vision of a starving Tyrannosaurus. It has run out of trees and is now eating Garland at the end of your bed.
The robot sitting on your front porch is really a machine to kill humans.
There’s a meteor traveling toward Earth. It strikes and humans start mutating to form animalistic, insect-like bodies.
Say, you’re escaping from a secluded, underground lab/bunker. When the man who’d previously captured you falls to his death.
The signs we all learned to ignore were placed for a reason.
You are living somewhere along the Delaware River in 1776. George Washington approaches you and asks you to join his army.
The nasty person next door who thinks New York City should be San Simeon.
A draft for a new and improved Bible, commissioned by the UUA.
You find a floating sphere hovering over an abandoned planet in sector 00001. You become obsessed with discovering its origins.
Time travel has been invented. Immediately, it is banned because all the newspapers of the past were changed.
An extraterrestrial spacecraft is found buried underground. The inhabitants within have been dead for thousands of years.
You have your body taken apart every ten years for routine maintenance.
If space travel was as commonplace as air travel, would my ticket to Nova Scotia get held floating in a security scanner?
Because of the government, you are forced to hire a dumber robot as your secretary.
Your city has been struck by three hurricanes in one week. The area map looks awkward.
While sailing in the middle of a sunny day, you locate the submarine Ambush. The body of a sailor floats on the surf
Your name is Nikolai Oshinsky. You are 5 years old and have dark hair. You have a grin full of teeth, and your green eyes sparkle.
You are accidentally transported to an alternate 1959, where anthropomorphic animals are the dominant species.
A human body is discovered frozen in your freezer. You invent cryogenics. He is my radically revived, and thank you.
During a lunar eclipse, you discover the shine of a Visitor’s light-speed ship in progress.
You know you see a lot of unknown creatures in the universe. You just wish they could all be a little more friendly.
You are God’s hand-picked one. You have come to the last level of earth to save the human race.
Not once, not twice, but three times did you appropriate lab funds as a teenager to build the perfect time machine.
Something terrible has happened. You wake up in a forest, but it is not the forest you remember. There is a ten-foot tall tower of bone in the centre.
You are a writer. A writer of Indiana Jones fan fiction. Every morning you wake up disappointed that you’re not in the fourteenth century.
You are the pilot on the first maiden voyage of the Smithsonian Oceania Ferris Wheel. You discover how to make it run in the opposite direction.
Using a radioactive scanning torch designed to comb through the earth, your team accidentally unearths a 15,000 year old female preserved in magnificent detail in a block of ice. She is standing on her feet and is holding a torch of her own albeit with her free hand.
While staring at the stars over your homeworld, your constant companion, your loyal dog gives birth to a litter of puppies. One has fur that is iridescent.
Grant has come back from the future to warn us about the dinosaurs. They’re angry and we should really be scared of them.
They said the human part was merely for saying farewell to loved ones and then self-destructing to prevent getting into all sorts of mischief. They neglected to mention the self-destruction was really for protection. Sure, its head and upper torso would detach from its body, but it could also control all the mechanisms within the room. Had you not disconnected it and hid its head, the women’s locker room would’ve been one iffy affair this morning.
You are a resurrectionist, you help people find their body suit.
Your inventor father worked on oxygen feelophiles – microorganisms that excrete oxygen. He made a breakthrough sometime in the late 70s…
You send a man back in time. Halfway through the trip, he learns he will be raping his own mother.
You are a hired gun in the far future. All you’ve known is war. The only thing on your mind is money.
You thought you had discovered the first mythical monster. You were wrong.
You are staring at your daughter’s college acceptance letter when they first turn the gravity field down to zero.
The life-extending machine you invented killed almost everyone who used it…
Your father…a slave to greed and corruption. You would stop him any way you could.
Abandoned by your religious family, you are raised by a great scientist, in hiding.
A collection of loosely connected short stories, compiled by a variety of authors
Your red pulse laser won’t fire. It turns out…it’s broken. This is hard to believe. You’ve always had excellent laser reliability. And now, something is causing your safety protocol to fail, and in so doing, just maybe, steering you to take a penis-shaped detour.
You can travel through time… kind of. You can only travel within the last three days, over and over.
Everyone has callouses on their faces because they have stopped shaving to protest soaring sharp razor prices. Worried barbers stage a revolt with razors.
Quantum mechanics allows you to stay in relatively constantly shifting stasis through time.
Typing in random combinations of prefixes and suffixes, you accidentally conjure your favorite childhood monster.
All of the traffic lights and stop signs are taken over by invisible robotics. Human drivers are forced to merge. What is your job at this time?
Island on Venus. Treehouse in a green rainforest. Blue eyes, wet nose. Muffin visits earth.
Pandora’s Castoff Box is found floating in space, your name and logo printed on the side.
In the basement of your house you find a hidden door. On the other side is a marble floor flanked by three statues of men.
You work for Google. The company is planning to have self driving cars on the road by 2027. You try to save her.
You are a time traveler. You can go anywhere in time. Absolutely anywhere . There is only one place you can’t go, which is to a time you already visited. Your goal is to travel to the earliest point you can and return to your own time. Animals travel as well, but do not communicate with you.
One of your co-workers has somehow covered his entire body with jelly.
Waking up to the sound of a screaming child. You walk to the nearby room on the spaceship and see your baby go floating past the open doorway…
The human race dies off completely except for you and you alone. The world you left behind isn’t the same as the one you return to.
You are entering a nearby event horizon when you remember you left an appliance on at home. You relay a message to someone promising them that you will take out the garbage. Give them three outcomes.
You have just written a book about time travel and you write to Dr. Abbott in 2010 to tell him this is all a hoax… and he replies.
The stars are becoming obscured. They are turning blue.
Kidnappers target infants for organs.
Your wife, in your bed, with another man
His new quantum computer can calculate reality. He has to show it to you.
On your neighbors front step is a small wooden crate. A note says not to open it.
Water vapor lights fill the room for miles one hundred feet in the air. After that, tanks with unknown gases, food, and water. The date stamped on the metal reads June 6, 1975. The design was so simplistic, and amidst the trees, it was easy to miss. It was easy to understand, though. It was bait used for capturing feral children. You were lured in, you wanted to free the girl who looked around 10 years old.
A pill. One swallow and all your dreams are true.
What do you discover when you run the Turing test on a Swarm Induced Neurotransmitter?
You’ve just built an ultimate weapon. It is capable of total nuclear annihilation. Or total annihilation of absolutely everything.
You are cloning dinosaurs for a theme park.
The Earth comes under attack by UFOs over the oceans. Without warning, the UFOs start attacking the coasts of various countries, sinking every fishing boat they see. You scramble your military jets and jets start to take out the UFOs. Pieces start to fall from the UFOs… they’re carrying fish.
And every year for almost as long you’ve received a postcard from your estranged daughter, from a strange place you’ve never been, called The Year 2571.
You have been genetically modified.
You discover a Mogwai you have named Gizmo that sprays anatine gas that makes hippies disappear.
Your ancestor, a brilliant man in the 18th century, designed much of the modern world. Step into his shoes now, and finish his work.
Teenagers worldwide are suddenly transported to a utopia…and then, no one knows where they went.
Your emergency back-up file is corrupted…and it contains your memories. All of them.
Your teenage son is dying. He’s been accepted into a medical research program. And you realise all they are going to do to him is basically rip his arms off.
In your apartment building, you live in the penthouse. Only, you did not always have this apartment.
Scientists have discovered that, through a quirk of genetics, your hair is slowly turning blue.
A bomb is dropped. It does not look like any bomb you’ve ever seen.
You’ve been captured by a race of beings that use biological technology in place of mechanical technology. Your captors want your secret to setting spell traps.
You, like all citizens, are implanted with a neural monitor from birth. It was mandatory.
You decide to verbally insult an application you did not get. The application is RoboCali, a cyborg android escalator. You die.
She’s unique. She’s beautiful. And you made her for the woman you love.
Your memory has been removed.
All the other grad students hate you. But you always had her.
A visitor to your planet travels home to Earth, with unexpected results.
You must choose one animal, and record the most interesting bit of human behavior you can observe over the next year…
Your life is changed by a miracle that occurs in your backyard. There’s a swarm of fireflies that refuse to move until your invitation dies.
The first work of a new author is heavily edited by someone else.
The Nazi’s win World War II. Sometimes they stomp around and keep you up. Other times they are a good bunch of guys to have over for game night.
For your tale, describe one characteristic of the species known to humans as Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
The stars move for no reason.
Your best friend is the world’s first true Artificial Intelligence. But before you connect with her you must complete a questionnaire. It is a long hard questionnaire. But you survive. And Flying Pete pesters you to fame and notoriety. Somehow.
You find the button. With a press of it, you might end all disease, poverty, and all people.
Your wife needs your permission to take the children for the weekend. You’ve never met them. You’ve never been married.
How quickly can your colony survive without supporting technology?
Betty Bronson is your mother’s weird neighbor. She has an unnatural fascination with haute couture…several centuries too soon.
Alice’s Adventures Underground became the bestselling novel of all time.
The mission was a success and now you are God. But the universe now looks nothing like you planned.
A man dives beneath the ocean of the world he knew.
Your wife travels back in time to stop you from proposing. What happens at the restaurant?
A mad scientist, a geek, a nerd. When this person is getting ready to overthrow the world, who will unite the superheros?
A moment of high-speed action in the lifestyle dome reminds you of how you will never fall.
The mortality rate of organic tummy tummy jelly is at an all-time high. Scientists try to figure out why.
You are the guinea pig for a powerful AI. Has something gone wrong?
The device will completely dissolve a human who steps inside.
The neighborhood is holding a community wide block party. People are invited to rearrange the houses as they see fit.
At the end of your street, someone runs into their house during a thunderstorm and disappears. You never see them again. Much to your mother’s disgust, the neighbors’ cats, dogs and cats begin slowly taking over their yard.
DNA information is rediscovered and machines that can duplicate people are allowed after a long discussion. It is ruled that it’s now not only legal, but that it’s perfectly fine to simultaneously have yourself cloned and raise the child from infancy.
Your older brother never liked having a twin. You never liked him.
The bones of the first cadaver on Mars are discovered. They’re yours.
An annoying intern at your mine/space station has been turned into a robot. You finally destroy him.
Your partner leaves you, saying they were only with you because of your wealth, not because they loved you. You find out the truth…
Ten years after his death, your grandfather’s name is plastered all over the news wires once again.
An invasion fleet arrives. They are ten times the size of Earth. You have 3 fighter jets and one F-16. What do you do?
There is a cut on the side of your palm that will not heal.
You wake up one morning, and because of your lack of sleep, your spouses’ snoring sounds like a symphony to you.
“You have to hand it to us humans,” Ann smiled, “We’re naturally good at anything that requires creativity.”
It is discovered that all matter is made up of jello. But it is a jello of a color that no one in the history of the world has been able to detect using their bare eyes.
You invent a super laser that could vaporize anything, as long as you were holding it.
400 years after fusion propulsion reactors shipwreck a ship on a planet named Yggdrasil, you are tasked with investigating.
The double rainbow still had a few colors left.
A day ago, she woke up on a ship’s ground. She had no memory of you. She did not even know her own name.
The story of a man who got a brain transplant. Unfortunately, it was not his own brain…
You discover you can change the outcome of past events. You proceed to spend the rest of your days changing your past mistakes, until you are bored with your life and decide to change the world. All the way back to the Big Bang.
Share these writing prompts, and this blog in general, with an aspiring sci fi writer or fan! Guide them on the right writing path! Go forth and write!
The only theory of physics anyone can agree on has just received a strange and confusing challenge. The referee is by no means impartial.
Earth’s flags are changed to only feature black stars on a white background. There is no explanation…
Your boss hasn’t had internet access all week. He reenters the office today.
Now that we’ve gotten some writing music and writing prompts out of the way let’s get on to…
You win the lottery, and invest in a time machine.
You have been sent back in time to a different planet and are captured by its drug trafficker children. You must think quickly to save your life…
Humans are energetically tied to the network. That’s why people always know what you feel.
A monkey can type Hamlet, and is immediately crowned the Shakespeare of the Primate species.
The emotional feelings of plants have always been thought of as one thing. Flowers are pretty and peaceful blossoms but what if they are belligerent toxic invasive flowers?
The clone you were growing reached full maturity. His percentage of human DNA had increased by 5 points.
Outside the window you see Mars. In your living room you see a box. The box has a switch. It’s ON. Can it be…
Your father taught you as his own.
Your parents were killed getting the hair-cut that was to change the world.
Forget your job. Become a space hermit.
Your girlfriend tells you she’s really Catwoman.
The red haired man with the seven heads of copper wakes up to find he has been sent to purgatory
You have opened the notebook containing all the words that have ever been written down. You read verse after verse, lines and stanzas…
You are stationed on Alpha Centauri.
You notice that the TV news reports are more and more unreasonably ridiculous. You decide something has to be done…
You receive a mysterious message that causes your heart to race.
Someone claims to have invented a time machine. He uses it to actually relive his experiences from the future.
You’ve discovered a taxidermist on your ship. This makes you feel ill at ease.
You find a spell that can turn a person into a monster. You’re tempted to try it on someone you hate–but who?
You are the smartest programmer at IOI, the biggest computer company in your country.
He is guarded. He has always been guarded. They want the riches of the mines. Why should he share with them?
You wake up in a bunker. You have no idea how long you have been sleeping. It’s hot. Running on batteries you will only last a week without water… Maybe less. There is ear powder and a toothbrush in the bathroom.
Is there actually any “Cork” in Corkscrews?
No one tells you it is fiction. You love reading stories of people being their own parents.
In your new town, there is a copy of you, duplicated down the very last molecule. He is a hero and everyone loves him.
You visit the future and people light their cigarettes with electricity.
Your character tasers an apple to death.
You got lost in a cave. You found a hole you descend into a futuristic time and place.
The anti-gravity generator prototypes were doing just fine…
You awake in a sterile white room…you’re naked. You have nothing but the clothes you’re wearing.
You have always dreamed of traveling the stars. Now, your dream has come true.
Your brother goes to space and never returns. Your parents are heartbroken. Years later, IMAX footage of the event is discovered.
You are the last human left on Earth.
Thomas Winslow had begun to awaken. To his entire body. but uniquely, to the artificial left hand that the nanites had not quite been able to repair, which he always felt numb and a bit heavier than the right one had.
A crack in worlds opens up in New York City, and from it steps a time traveling, dimension hopping historian. All he wants is to collect information on the human experiment.
Cyberpunk Juliet. You freeze at her window.
Two History Professors discover a steampunk world.
You are trapped in a black hole. Survive.
It’s a 66 Trillion Trillion Trillion Trillion Trillion Trillion Trillion chance that your sarcophagus will fail and burn you alive. And yet, it does.
The court has sentenced him to death for the crimes he has committed. He found a way to become the first non-corporeal entity in existence.
A hobbyist scientist accidentally teleports herself to a new timeline. She leaves her failed experiment behind in the original timeline.
The first overtly, overtly sci fi story published is the comic “Roswell That Ends Well”. It makes all the major papers.
The library is closing for the night. Only you remain.
The internet, on its last legs. The last people to log off were mistaken for terrorists when they took the physical World Wide Web with them.
Your remote probe just encountered a small collision in space. It is a glitch, a strange signal that you can’t explain. It happens again two days later. This time it’s not a glitch.
It is discovered that two dimensions are colliding with ours. The fabric of reality begins to crumble when someone steps through from their dimension…
Death is not the end when you sell your soul to the devil for a new body.
The last thing she will remember was stepping out onto her porch. The wind was calm. The leaves rustled in the trees. In her hand was an apple.
In your family, being able to see ghosts is common.
An idol of a pagan god is found to be a real person.
You fall into a well. As you expect a dark fate you enter a portal to another world. Like Alice.
You just appeared in Spock’s quarters.
The concubines of Alleh find that She demands lovers as well as their total devotion.
You are a molecular cook. You specialize in recipes requiring the impossible.
The robots you are watching fight for “honor and glory,” and play chess using living hearts as pieces.
You’re investigating reports of a baby dragon. You kill it with a revolver.
The door ID displays your name. You are already two minutes late for work.
You live in a world where the ritual of offering fellow humans as a sacrifice to elder gods is the height of fashion.

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