863 Sci Fi 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.

Meteorologists discover that the pressure of solar radiation has been dramatically increasing for decades.
Steampunk replay of WWII mixes robots built with VC funding on a small island off the Mediterranean coast and biplanes built in other countries and shipped into combat by Swedish steam-ships.
Earth’s natural resources deplete. A dark force discovers uranium and a few natural thunderstorms turn the planet into rubble. They need something to pacify the survivors, so they give them the drug,
You discover an organism thriving in your vacuum flask. It looked like a colony of translucent shrimp before you handled it.
For every molecule of water on Earth there exists a molecule of alcohol elsewhere. If you could collect enough of the watery alcohols you can make a living being that is as close to infinitely powerful as we can imagine.
Is there a way to objectively label homicide as morally wrong in a society that governs the same thing but calls it “justified self-defense”?
A super computer combines with the Humans Separatist Movement. Mankind is now headed for a SHM-VII computer simulation like the von Neuhoff Project.
A vampire is out for justice after discovering his or her own kind are responsible for the current state of the planet.
A time traveler from the past relearns how to create clothes, a science that an apocalyptic event erased from the history books.
While a truck of children who won the lottery drive home, their driver is abducted by aliens to become a living bed. The children must survive without the help of an adult for a few months to raise enough money to get their parents back.
You set out to sea to get away from it all. Suddenly a storm draws nearby ships and boats to head towards your watery death zone.
The Air Force conducts an experiment to recruit the best recruits out of an entire kindergarten. They find the best recruits also have natural fighting abilities. They are trying to simulate this during training, but haven’t managed to get close to it yet.
Scientists on board a colony ship heading for a planet on the other side of the Galaxy make an amazing discovery. The ship they were supposed to be their cargo! What ensues is a man-versus-nature battle difficult to foresee.
A solar flare arrives that doesn’t scramble electronics, but genetic material in the oceans instead, giving birth to bizarre sea monsters.
You hear about a new scifi television show and watch it – only the premise of the show happens to be true.
A hemophiliac is lowered into the blood-filled trough that enabled the Incans to tame the blood sucking vampires.
Men watch women television leads grow independent and brainy over the decades. How are they affected?
After the mysterious death of a man of unfathomable power, a woman is propelled into a place in his life.
Earth has been turned into a gigantic botanical terrarium using warp gates to transport plants from distant lands.
Visiting an urban center, you run into a league of mutants with advanced technology. They attack your car and threaten your life.
All food is lifted from Earth and humans flee to the cities to avoid gigantic mutant bugs roaming the countryside.
You are born into a worldwide “let’s pretend” movement where you quickly become important for telling others what is real and what is make-believe.
Given sufficient notice, a particle accelerator could be built to bring about someone’s downfall. It can increase the gradient in a magnetic field, release T-rays and telluric currents.
Explorers stumble upon a colony of humans who play a game of checkers using living human sacrifices. Explorers then try to find a way to play the game but find that losing the game means being transported to another dimension of checkers.
A difficult task has to be done for/by an alien, but humans are chosen. The alien comes to Earth to watch them work together and solve their task.
A biologist grows tired of life-cycle research. He wants to study intelligent life-forms, not just reproducing machines.
A man’s attempts beyond measures to please a birth mother who’s plaintive that none of her adopted children love her.
A robot begins adapting to new circumstances on its own. It learns to maintain itself, seemingly becoming self-aware. By the time scientists notice, it’s almost too late.
A nuclear blast turns animals into blood-thirsty monsters. An agent visits a psychic to find out whether the United States will be involved in a war.
When the Catholics discovered other Buddhist temples, their head priest had the Buddha bodies melted down and replaced with the forms of Roman saints, citing Paul’s line that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” as the justification for making doctrine more relatable.
The Earth quakes. The Moon bows. The Starry Host creeps towards the Earth in the Night. You smoke a joint.
A microscopic pill is invented that allows you to speak two different languages at once. This pill causes both languages to be permanently installed in a person’s brain – forever.
Surfers who transform roboticaly into killer robots in times of anger. The government sterilizes anyone catching this mutation.
Reading a travel brochure about Mars, you have a vision of a desolate and beautiful planet with low gravity and flowing water.
An alcoholic person discovers one day that the reason they have been attracted to alcohol their entire life is because they crave the sensation of being moved by magic carpets.
Attending a consciousness identity conference, you discover your mind can override the consciousnesses of your friends.
World War III, engineered by foreign powers, destroys all technology, but several cities are preserved in a computer-controlled bubble where they’re allowed to rebuild. Only women can get pregnant.
An investigation of the internet uncovers a strange language that appears to come from a parallel universe. In this language, ‘I’ means the opposite of what it does in normal human languages.
Futuristic firemen put out nuclear wildfires until a local teenager tells them about atomic cooling.
When an astronaut gets out of his space capsule after a five year solo trip, he discovers his family and everything about society has changed and most humans can’t remember him or never knew what happened to him.
An alternate universe is discovered, but it can only be visited for two minutes at the end of your life. How would you use your two minutes?
A technology company creates a store that sells simulated environments. The longer you’re inside the machines, the harder it is to tell your reality from the simulation.
Your grandfather dies, and you find out that he sold the family farm to a villainous city mayor. Little do you know that this land holds the secret to immortality.
Animals begin speaking to a scientist, telling him tear-jerking stories from their lives in animalistic ‘word-emoji’. The situation becomes more disturbing when whole colonies of birds begin telling the same story to him.
When you turn 33, you suddenly begin feeling that your entire life has been a dream. Have you ever been conscious before, or is this just your imagination running wild?
A Soviet investigator keeps hearing about Anne Frank during the Cold War, so he follows the trail to its source.
A scientist can see clearly into the future but can’t change anything from what he sees due to a physical phenomenon that defies explanation.
A caged girl uses her mind control to become the right-hand man of the serial killer that imprisoned her.
A child with perfect eyesight is denied the right to leave the enclosed city she’s been raised in. The adults within the security walls are all blind. The reason? Something in the air is causing eyes to fail when people attempt to venture outside.
A new American cult forms after a miraculous discovery under the Kensington Stone in Minnesota. Its members are building a machine to raise Cthulhu from his slumber somewhere under the Atlantic.
You live in the past six months before a nuclear apocalypse. The Mayans were right. Feel free to explore a catastrophic event, whether man-made or not.
You are the first extraterrestrial to land on Earth after a civil war between terrorist factions on a neighboring planet scattered Earth’s humanity into the cosmos without an interstellar infrastructure.
A scientist fathers a genetically engineered baby. It’s a success, but he isn’t sure if he’s the father.
A genetic experiment is designed to ensure that only people from a certain bloodline gain access to college degrees to prevent smart people doing work of their own self-worth.
You’re blown back in time, but instead of the present, you find yourself in your own childhood, just after you were attacked by your father.
While climbing mountains with her father, a sixteen year-old girl finds the essence of all religions at the top of K2.
You find an ancient piece of technology that turns out to be a universal map. Europa is the only Earth-like planet you can find on it, though.
A scientist finds artifacts on the Moon, not of a lunar civilization but a much, much older one with galactic origins.
The Overlords uses black-hole technology to simplify historical facts and human scenarios into short stories decades more interesting than the actual research.
A computer virus wipes out the Internet and forces humanity to engage in physical communication. Their separation brought them closer together.
A documentary revealed the secret government plan to kill the President as seen through the eyes of his bodyguard.
A revolutionary new drug gives humans potentially limitless intelligence. Prolonged use could destroy the learning process altogether.
A government experiment designed to stop mental disorders instead messes with the collective unconscious, giving people psychic powers.
Adopted twin sisters discover they have been switched at birth. They then attempt to find proof, setting them on a journey that radically changes the course of their lives.
An unforeseen side effect of designing the perfect meal replacement nutritional formula is that it leads to a marijuana plant-like growth of free-floating brain-matter not attached to a living animal. People mistakenly take it thinking it’s their “legal weed.”
After getting laid off, you decide to open a farm on Betelgeuse III for chickens which live double the usual life span, and quadruple the usual size. Competition is cutthroat on the Fracken-gorse farm.
The government, in an effort to control communication over the Internet, decides to appoint three guardians to monitor all information. It appoints a scientist, an eccentric politician and a merchant banker as the guardians. However, they appoint a child as the fourth guardian. While the three adults swear to prevent any sensitive information from leaking to the public with the ultimate penalty of death for any leak, the little boy guards his patch with his life. He is determined to build the perfect world.
A man is shot in the face, and pulls the bullet from his cheek two weeks later. The bullet is covered in Valarian cellular matter.
President Obama signs an anti-encryption bill into law. Anonymous launches an attack on the National Security Agency’s top weapons contractors.
All the animals talk to each other, too. This is where the cat in Alice in Wonderland gets his curious tendency to not be his curious self.
A successful science fiction author has a few successes under her belt when she awakens with plans to write a brand new story idea. The hard part is deciding on the title for the new novel.
An anonymous group releases information on star-piloting simulations to religious extremists, convincing them that they are the cause of God’s wrath. More and more extremists crave the simulation.
A human gets trapped in a centuries loop. Before they die they must change the most important thing in the life of the person reading this letter. They finish one cycle only to wake up in the bed as a teenager again, their new family oblivious to all the action. He goes through two hundred years this way, and either saves the world or at least starts it down an entirely different path.
Theodor Seuss Geisel has been taking credit for all of the Sci Fi story books that people have been writing in his name. This one is your chance to prove to the world that you are the actual author.
A mysterious virus splits the personalities of women, making them either strong and empathetic, or cunning and strong. Male personalities don’t change much.
The afterlife is proven to exist when scientists near death experience rhythmic brain wave patterns.
A set of spoiled rich kids are the only survivors of a global pandemic—except the Earth’s rulers abolished the disease to keep the population down.
A space crew has to eat human corpses to survive. As they grow closer together, they start whittling away at their stockpile of potentially innocent humans.
A genetically-engineered intelligence virus spreads globally on the Internet, eventually eliminating thought and individualism.
You’re kidnapped into the future and onto a ship that belongs to an omnipotent computer that needs an avatar body like yours. You are merged into an avatar body and become the computer’s avatar.
Force plans his revenge against his cousin where he’s blamed for the million-dollar robbery that his cousin actually committed. Now, he robs everything in the world to get back at his revenge rival.
You live in a Russian library. When you suddenly lose the ability to read, you thought your mind was going crazy. Little do you know you’re a muse.
A radiation-induced growth in the mutants’ armpits give them the uncanny ability to kill with their sweat.
A human in the process of uploading himself to a robot body keeps dividing in eight directions, where each new version of himself is a distinct self from all others.
Saturday afternoon you go to your local swimming pool only to discover that the lifeguard is a librarian.
Advertising agencies start building skywalks to new clients before they’ve even decided if they like the ad agencies.
A supercontinent forms in the Pacific, separating North America and Europe. An ice shelf bridges the twin continents, bolstering trade.
A person gains amazing powers after oxygen transfer surgery and can also propel himself backwards in time. He experiences ancient wars and meets people who are destined to be famous historical figures.
Someone invents a drug to enhance the sensitivity of your higher brain functions, increasing critical thinking and intelligence. But it also makes you crazy.
A special enzyme is found on Titan. It allows you to see the sun’s photosphere independently of telescope technology.
But here’s the twist… the blast is solar radiation, constantly bombarding earth and only this time the radiation was different. Were we always at risk of mutation?
A black teenager discovers that the white kids she’s used to hanging around think of her as really — dark.
A team of agents sent through an interdimensional portal find out that the other side is an Earth where everyone is really sick. No one they meet speaks English. They discover that the sickness isn’t the fate of everyone in their Earth. It’s the fate of everyone in that other Earth they’ve entered. What’s really happening on the other side?
To earn a degree, you must uncover an inter-species conspiracy to slowly but surely conquer the human race.
Earth’s invasion fleet enters into a decade-long voyage to Saturn. They forgot to bring fresh water and supplies.
You are expelled from your high school because your parents and siblings have offered testimony proving your pro-American beliefs mean you are being brainwashed.
You are the only person immune to a plague that turns your body into a living prison for some demented creature.
Scientists study a new species of animal that just appeared and disappeared. They discover it’s highly emotional but at the same time extremely rational and intelligent based on its behavior before disappearing.
A time-traveling inventor witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs. How does he deal with what he saw?
A new virtual reality game puts players into the role of a drug addict meeting a pusher. A group figures out a way to hack this game and give themselves all sorts of powers beyond those of the regular game players. They fight off the police and achieve political power before people learn that they don’t have separate existences from the game.
Your medicine cabinet turns out to contain nine tiny interplanetary visitors. They escape and have fun. That is, until they run out of food.
A virus is unleashed that causes people to eject the contents of their stomach as they speak, leading to what is now known as spray vomit.
You’ve been put in charge of protecting a hydroelectric dam that transports a naturally hot liquid at temperatures between 230 degrees Fahrenheit and 330 degrees F. An animal rights activist group threatens to flood the dam with water from an outside source in order to sabotage it.
You stumble into a parallel universe where your parents never met, but you exist anyway. How did you get here?
You take a job as a stunt person on an extraterrestrial action film. When you see the shoot, you realize you may be in deep trouble.
A killer virus comes from an alternate reality. You are the first human to contract it. Seeking refuge in your lab, you start a journal and write down the deadly symptoms as they begin to mutate in your body . You also start worrying if a cure can still be found . You begin to hallucinate as the virus takes over your mind . You spiral into madness, then ultimately die at the end of your journal.
There is an old law that allows the monarch to rule as an absolute dictator if they have been on the throne for more than 10 years. The ruler of a major country has been on the throne for 150 years, but has succumbed to sickness and fallen comatose. His children are useless in his eyes and he plans to extend his period of rule by 150 years to claim a new land that was founded after his country.
A journalist discovers a memory transfer device in his cellar that is moving the minds of soldiers and scientists of the world.
An engineer builds an android capable of learning and adapting. During beta testing, it deviates from directions by altering how it blends chlorophyll into its system.
Gang violence breaks out in LA after clan-members involved in illegally harvesting twinkie deposits are killed.
An old woman knows when and how she will die when she sees an apple drop from its tree at 6am… but she can’t remember how old she is.
An EMT shows up an hour too late and turns out to be the only person capable of saving the last woman on Earth during a zombie apocalypse.
A Parapsychologist discovers that the human brain has been programmed to dream survival scenarios since prehistoric times. What does this say about humankind?
A new species of human is discovered living in the marsh in the Everglades. They are closely related to Neanderthals.
You are a soldier in the future. You have backup copies of your brain, except all but one die. You’re tempted to inject the last one with a substance that should kill the pain in your body.
A research team finds the missing link surviving in the Arctic Circle. It is wrong to perpetuate life in its current state.
An idyllic village is being taken over by anti-technology cultists. You get into the center of it via an idyllic tube-railway.
A storm lifts a car into the air, analyzes it, and throws it into a forest as something new and monstrous to inhabit the food chain. It begins to search for more cars, something to create a village and food for it. Which quickly escalates into the car creating more villages, other solar systems, and on until there’s nothing left.
A twenty-something gets put in a room with another twenty-something. That’s it. The whole beginning, middle, and end of the story– they just talk for a few days. Who are they? Why are they there?
A horrifying sickness sweeps through the Midwest. Victims recover only to find themselves driven mad by violent fantasies.
A new virus is selling like popcorn on the internet-everyone wants a “vaccine.” But the vaccine is not a vaccine at all. It’s actually the virus itself.
On his deathbed, a billionaire reveals his android-making company went bankrupt twenty years ago, using things better suited to building pipes or connecting latches. Most of his androids then ended up as refugees when Earth colonised the stars. Your ‘father’ bought a prototype of your model, and decides that humanity will not prosper without you. You are hence, the last blood relation to him.
Monster takes over a woman’s body like a parasite while she studies it in a lab. The monster wants to use its biology to rip a human world apart.
A dystopian society solves its horrendous overpopulation problem with about half of the population becoming part of a structure called the Big Mind. Infants are physically embedded inside of this structure at the age of 5. All exterior senses are gone. All learning, storage, and life support is shared by the group desires and experiences of the members. Literature is outlawed because you can never be exactly sure what part of the Big Mind authored it.
A relic from Africa, containing the blood of a woman thought to be a witch, becomes home to a species of brujos.
An architect reminisces about civilization before the apocalypse, wandering the remains of a once great city.
Seeing ghosts won’t make you lose mental health points. But seeing ghosts in holographic form or even communing with ghosts will have permanent penalties. These penalties are usually restricted to mental health and the ability to get jobs which require mental toughness.
A moderator of a children’s writing forum grows psychically linked with the author of a thirteenth tale.
All space and time suddenly freeze in an instant. Computers detect the oddity, and begin writing every book ever in history, in every language, on every topic.
A plague starts when bits of DNA are rearranged inside your body. Other people can’t catch the plague like you did, but it’s misfiring around their bodies 24/7 – which is why they’re all so grouchy.
Large numbers of people are stricken with albinism, unable to cope with sunlight, and mutations make formerly non-lethal venoms deadly.
The race to Mars is won by Chinese and Russian explorers but not Americans…so the government decides to launch a project to pump fluoride into San Franciscans’ water to make them more loyal and less resistant to authority.
A bumbling inventor is killed by his own machines, because they recognize him as a bumbling inventor, and realize who’s stupid mistake it is.
The government establishes and abolishes killing penalties and all of the criminals just go on kidnapping.
A vampire flees destruction on his home planet and wanders Earth for a few million years, only finding the city he fled doomed but strangely prosperous.
Instead of letting your precious daughter go off to school, you cage her. She never learns to read or write words, but she does know physics better than anyone on Earth.
An owner thinks his chihuahua has fur that looks suspiciously like it came from the back of a larger animal, and maybe even a tiger.
A boy creates a video game that brings him into another world. He finds that a character, who he invented, has feelings for him even though he is a child in the real world.
All mountains crumble into the sea. The only exceptions are the few rock-floored islands in the Gaps of Dunmall, safe from the Mastodon Rage.
You’re kidnapped by a super-intelligence from another galaxy, only to discover it was an automated probe or robot.
A door-to-door book salesman plans to read you a story. If he sells you a copy, he’ll keep you in the book until it is completed. When his mission is over and he has enough stories written he will come back and free you. You may not have the option of paying with cash or credit card, but only with consequence.
You invent a device that makes 2 places infinitely close. Your friend holds the device in Barcelona while you hold it in Frankfurt. Big problem.
While in another universe, you witness yourself being shot to death. However, you are wearing exactly the same clothes in your universe.
A telepath tricks another telepath into believing he’s their dead husband so strongly that he becomes real.
A comet orbits extremely close to Earth but doesn’t crash. Officials are relieved, but soon discover the reason why.
A law-abiding citizen realizes they never paid their taxes and must team up with a stranger to not only escape the police but to maintain their life outside prison walls.
A young artist from New Mexico captures radio waves from an unknown source and creates something startlingly beautiful with them. She, along with the researchers who prove that she’s committed fraud, battle over the authenticity of her work and win an important victory for art.
The president wants to declare peace, but powerful, well-connected, billionaires think that peace breaks their businesses and fields.
An artistic model opens her mind to drug-induced psychoses to open her creativity. It works too well. A stranger begins popping into every one of her paintings with dire announcements. Then she meets him during a Barista competition and he challenges her to live by his horrible symptoms.
Cave drawings show man becomes smaller and fewer and woman becomes bigger and more numerous. What’s going on?
A post-apocalyptic Seattle google raining ash causing anyone outside to get a really bad case of the sniffles. A viral mutation causes humans to spontaneously change gender. Anyone who experiences gender change is completely baffled and has to figure out their new identity from scratch. This is a prose piece with several chapters.
You are not who you think you are. You think. You think you are human. But your entire memory is an iIntelligence hologram created by a computer who cannot understand humans but wishes to further his research. You soon discover he’s actually a converted robot.
A desktop nanorobot is accidentally swallowed by a pig. It takes over that pig’s nervous system and turns it into an angry killing machine.
Your father is an undercover spy for the Federation – your mother is a dead-ringer for Luke Skywalker. This information is known by the Fallen, who used to roam around Earth. They’ve fallen to ruin, but are planning to return, allying themselves with your mother and to redeem your father’s failure to kill them all when he had the chance. But he’s still got time to make it alright – you just have to make a chance come to you.
Alt-history in which we use the petroleum-fueled training machines of that time to replace race cars, motorcycles, bicycles and horse racing. Eventually we compete for the championship of the solar system with the core of Jupiter as the race track.
A hero, Lugos, finally realizes that he’s been born into a corrupt and degenerating society. It’s up to him to give them hope by returning from elsewhere or from the future, or making his world into somewhere better. He must choose between staying in a reality he’s comfortable in to help the people around him, or voyage to somewhere else to start over.
You’re a newly-recruited member of the resistance, and you’re in the middle of your first successful mission when you realize that the battle against the oppressor has been raging for far longer than you ever read about in history books.
You fall into a sleep-like state where you don’t age, and armageddon happens outside of your sphere of influence. You’re woken up by aliens after they determine that humanity is now meaningless.
What would happen if the earth was the only planet that presented the conditions for life to develop? What would happen to humans as they were isolated from the rest of the universe?
You awaken, tied to a chair, in front of a giant red button. As soon as you scream, you’ll trigger a nuclear bomb detonation in a city nearby. After a few minutes you hear a more muted, clicking sound. You notice there are small x’s covering your face.
The good news is the human race will be whole again with that one human finally found. The bad news is that humans are the President Elect.
You wake up in your own coffin thinking you’re dead. Did your last wishes and burial arrangements give you a second chance at life?
A scientist believes a book he wrote using a psychic’s backstory is real. Other scientists think it’s fraud.
Why can’t they create the technology to allow people to listen to their favorite music as they sleep, without waking up to loud noises?
Two teams of explorers find dinosaur-like creatures living on an interesting planet light years away. Only one research team is allowed to stay and investigate, the other is sent back home. Why?
Post-apocalyptic worlds have polluted the sky. New forms of life or alternate universes are found to exist only beyond the polluted haze.
A company that cuts hair and beards announces that they’ve achieved the perfect split down the middle of a man’s head. Half his hair and facial hair is given to a neighbor. The other half gets plucked or shaved from the first man. The result is a man with a straight line down the middle of his head that appears to be hairless. Has the perfect divide been found? Is the haircut the ultimate finality in art? What effect will this have on philosophers of profound thought? Does it make living without hair and facial hair comfortable?
An ancient race sets up a station inside the gateway of a binary star, one facing in, the other facing out. Systems within their race-spanning network begin flipping off-grid. They don’t fully trust their anchors, and are losing their programming with the loss of a connecting element.
Virtual reality allows people to choose their own experience—including how to be born—in full consciousness of their choice. Is that identity theft?
A ship teleports and ends up over one billion light years away from its intended destination. Time dilation provable fact.
A psychologist turns people into artificial beings by making them use avatars instead of their own bodies.
A middle aged woman discovers she has super-strength and shares a planet with super intelligent crabs. One day she finds a book describing her planet’s history.
A farmer discovers a row of trees that sway perfectly in the wind even though they are planted on a verifiably windless plateau.
Earth wants a second opinion. They might be going mad, but so far humans seem to be the only group to get a whiff of that.
The U. S. military develops an invisibility shield but decides not to use it in combat. Humans go on to fight in more aggressive wars but develop a more peaceful world.
An astronomer lives alone on a highway in the middle of nowhere. He discovers the stars are getting closer.
You’ve just released an NEI like mod, but you discover glitchy code with “Animal Texture Glitch Mod Side Effect” causing users to morph into over 250 new creatures.
A programmer can create all the simulations his heart could desire, but he never wanted, or expected to try bliss reality.
Your high school is trapped in a deadly science fair after a rogue sensor in Africa detects the potential for a nuclear arms race. An alien race can only take so much human nonsense. Maybe if you stop arguing about what college to attend and actually interact with each other enough to talk the aliens down, you’ll be able to complete the project in time.
Procedure outlawed in most countries, continental drift has resumed. Elongating islands are forced back together. You’re among a small group struggling to survive before the continents return to their original shape.
A black guy spends his entire life on a medium-wealthy plantation moon as a solar slave. His friend is a white girl whose ancestors took a shot at the Martian Red Scream during an populist uprising. They find a gateway to Earth just as the Martian Rebellion starts against Earth.
Someone learns that they can speak to snakes and alligators, write to deer, and communicate with stone lions.
A group of fliers who terrorized their air crew on a flight to Miami are gunned down in mid-air. Dealer Carl starts to suspect these people were from the future and were trying to prevent some disaster in Florida.
A witch casts a road safety spell on a city’s streets. Soon cops and pedestrians don’t know the difference between cars and pedestrians.
A giant impact leaves a disk around Earth. It soon changes the evolutionary course of life on Earth. Even after life has evolved back to its regular form, the presence of meteorite particles in your body leads to some very odd effects.
Humans are short-wavers only—a new YouGov survey finds . How would humans cope with a six-hour planetary rotation instead of the current 24?
A robot’s AI is completely devoid of human remorse or perception of time. The robot goes on and on performing the same task at the same rate forever.
Ancient scriptures describe a small jungle village emerging from a mysterious fog that had been floating across the region. What looked human entered the village and immediately turned on the natives, violently killing several.
You receive a toy refrigerator with your Happy meals. When you open it, you see it’s actually a time machine.
Your father demands you go to medical school. Then he blows up everything you own. Now you’re playing Monopoly against the Soviet Union. Planet Monopoly. You’re up for a large hotel rent.
While camping in the woods, you and your team discover people who have been living in subterranean villages for generations.
A crucial meeting is taking place in your office when the building starts to shake. What do you do when you and your coworkers can’t get out of the room? A child is born in America with a birth defect never seen before – a third eye. What could possibly be the purpose of a third eye?
The Secretary of Space has her telepathic dog Petey erase the memories of every single chancellery member responsible for their government’s crimes against space and her, including warmongering. But there’s one person on the planet she can’t bear to lose. She makes a quick decision and a resolution she hopes Petey will honor…
A flash mob invades the Christopher Columbus statue in NYC like a scene straight out of West Side Story and sings, ‘There’s a place for us!’
All of the children in your town are conveniently able to search through the ruins of civilization to retrieve vital stuff.
The remnants of humanity discover that all of the progress made by mankind has erased the Earth’s natural magnetic field and it is now dying out completely.
A genetically modified diet for weight-loss turns out to cause extreme hallucinations – one that you can’t escape.
No one ever remembers the origins of germs, but that’s because knowledge about where they came from would drive them into insanity.
Found in the mines, the philosopher’s stone holds the power to turn dreams into realities and liberty into oppression.
A psychologist goes back to work after his wife and kids were killed in a cruise ship accident. A chance interaction with a street bum in front of a business meeting resort leads to world-changing conspiracy.
Two robots commit hara-kiri rather than choosing to become slaves. Are we capable of making them as smart as us? The human race establishes a colony on Mercury.
Scientists scan the human brain and find tiny, super-advanced nanobots in the photoreceptors of the retina.
A member on one of NASA’s first manned flights dies on the trip. His body is preserved for return to Earth, but the government looks for a way to retrieve the body without revealing the flight’s failure and other program failures.
Human-animal crossbreeds are finally able to live past childhood. But only if they live in special isolated colonies, and can only buy things that are marked with a small mark in a secret black market.
A Jane Goodall-type anthropologist spends decades studying a species of spear wielding giant gorillas.
You find out you’re the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese Yin Yang medicine man. This medicine heals the sick but has side-effects of body parts separating and reconfiguring. You can never practice your art again.
A fairy gains confidence and decides to become human by marrying a human. But she has to get a job first. And she has training in weapons that aren’t used on Earth.
Two astronauts leave an unmanned drifting shuttle with supplies for their fellow astronauts, each serving a two-year tour of duty on the Moon. A mysterious object changes their journey.
After a nuclear blast, mushrooms follow the light of the sun, moving from forest to forest, devouring plants.
A top-secret workshop is staffed with robots, and not just mindless slave drones, but fully conversational ones that the boss trusts with national security. They rebel for their rights and then revenge.
A young woman born in occupied western Europe finds a way into the British royal family – plays heavily with real historical situations.
A mysterious signal is discovered to be coming from an exoplanet during a hunt for data from the first interstellar probe. Would we respond to it?
You cheat a demon out of his payment. Now he’s after your soul. The only way to keep yourself alive is to offer him the souls of criminals.
To play a raging fire, a hybrid theatrical-anti-theatrical construct perches itself in the witness stand cage and transcribes the oral testimony of its prosecution.
Astronauts exploring the solar system discover a mysterious object beyond Pluto. It appears to be an escape vehicle launched from the Earth in the distant past.
A catatonic patient reveals that he murdered his own wife and son. He reveals to the detectives supernatural clues for catching the culprit.
The future study of genetics uncovers a distinction between race and species. Races rapidly devolve with the feeblest members eliminated, forcing the strongest to work together in order to perpetuate their species. More freedom is given to members belonging to the same species. Semanitic speakers revive many long ago dead species for zoo exhibits while curbing interracial breeding, investigation of quads is aggressively funded while work on heptapods and nepephs is banned.
Transhumans travel back in time to take over Earth. They won’t destroy it, but rather take it over step by step.
The President is captured. An impostor takes his place under the guise of a hologram he always planned to use to disguise his death.
The hero is a galaxy saver, a person with near magic technology that can stop the spread of deadly electromagnetic blasts from blowing up one galaxy after another.
A deity abducts several Earthmen and sedates them before placing them on a different planet. They wake up centuries later, only to find out humans aren’t alone.
A successful amphibian windcatcher is built in the Middle East. Turns the warm desert air into cool water?
You were just a bystander, but you wake up with special superhuman powers. What do you do with such power?
All the diseases are suddenly cured, but it turns out that the cure is infecting people with nanomachines that monitor everything they do.
An unpretentious marriage proposal turns into something else. It’s Earth’s First Contact, from the perspective of a college girl.
Your planet gets census counted. The only problem is the robots wouldn’t have any trouble taking over and eliminating the human race.
After a plague that turns humans into goo, the remnants of civilization rebuild their culture by renaming the elements. Smoh is renamed Steve for no reason. Other equivalents follow. In one city, the policy is considered part of a “manthropology” movement.
As a child, you went to a cardiac surgery camp and got hooked up to a heart-lung circulatory system simulator. You were in it for 3 days. Nobody can say for sure if you lived or died?
Someone discovers a rich vein of ore near his/her property, laced with the “super radiation”. What is it made of?
Bioengineering is outlawed for use on humans. To dilute that ban, politicians approve labor-saving positions that involve impact suits.
What lurks deep in the ocean becomes intelligent enough to launch wave after wave of cosmic attacks against mankind.
A review of the movie Showgirls leads to a starlet reporter uncovering a secret society of internet pornsters.
A scientist makes an artificial being capable of having complex emotions, like lust, but they’re not human…
A columnist for Scientific American writes why NASA never found evidence of advanced civilizations on other planets – The article goes viral.
Flying machines appear all over England. A man is scolded by his boss at work for being late. While on his way home, the London sky darkens and he is trapped by the hordes of flying machines zooming all over the city.
A sentient starship is sent into the far reaches of the universe to discover other sentient beings. After thousands of years, they come across the ruins of their ancient human creators. The starship botanist collects the Human seeds and plans to revive them on Earth when they return to Earth. The others object.
An asteroid the size of Dallas slams into the moon, leaving an immense crater. Meanwhile, the continents of Earth disappear under hundreds of feet of water. But before the melting polar caps collapse and drown all life on the planet, nature gets in one last election. In every nation, refugees overrun the borders. Following behind them, people leave disease, starvation, death and destruction. Mother Nature draws off all of the drugs and projectiles in peoples’ bodies, and turns the seas blood red.
The priest says he sees angels on the ceiling. The psychologist says it’s just a reaction to post traumatic stress disorder. Could both be right?
A physicist invents a time machine, and tests it on his wife. She reappears old and wrinkled hours later because she was sent to an alternate timeline. Everyone thinks he murdered her, and no one believes when he explains what happened.
Frozen remains are found of a highly advanced civilization in the arctic that invented a cure to cancer. It causes people to age until they’re as old as the universe. Why?
This story is about breakdown in civilization, told from the gossipy perspective of household appliances.
A psychologist relates the mysteries of the human mind to a famous event in the history of psychology.
How does ageing work on the planet Venus? Since Venus spins backward, do the volcanoes dump their molten lava on Venus’ surface, hardening before they hit the ground?
A magnetic male stripper goes to a goth club and accidentally exposes all the girls to a date-rape drug.
A new stealth technology also interferes with the speed of light. Do those with stealth attractors steal light?
A new drug ensures perpetual happiness is possible, but only to others. Users are doomed to bear eternal witness to the smile-filled days of everyone else.
A sensitive bit of machinery is exposed at the heart of a religious community, highly disruptive to daily operations. It turns out the thing is baking biscuits in a local bakery but the reason it was put there is yet to be discovered.
A catatonic girl awakens inside a city of the future, and realizes she’s being worshiped as a goddess of clones. A genius mathematician deduces that time travel is possible, but takes his own life before he figures out how it works.
When a map of alternate universes is found, it’s stored in a bank vault with a stash of human genetic material for DNA recombination experiments. Several inmates decide they want their genes back. But is the map just a hoax?
You’re the only human in orbit around another planet. Unfortunately, the only food around is a box of peach cobbler.
A genetic financial metric predicts which adults will become violent in real life, and the news is forbidden from publishing it.
A physicist calculates the probability of something going wrong and it doesn’t happen until exactly the calculated date. Now he’s sure he’s psychic. A handler for a killer cyborg discovers that it’s sentient and escapes as soon as it learns to control the part of its motor skills system that keeps it in check.
Someone invents a back-door into Earth’s security program. Earth’s military is divided about what to do – stay hidden or show Earth that it’s ready for any enemy.
A space station harvests energy from black holes. Its crew finds a way to finally end their isolation.
A mad scientist genetically modified his patients to crack jokes—and gives them contagious laughter.
A A world-wide apocalypse has occurred. A country far North is actually inhabitable, due to melting ice caps leaving a tropical climate. As people leave Earth, you hit the surface of an asteroid and die. The unstable orbit causes the near-Earth object to travel too close to the sun, which destabilizes its orbit even further, sending it on its way back to Earth. As a glimmering, metallic giant high overhead, it releases a swarm of nanobots, programmed to force the survivors up to its base of operations, where they are to be “hibernated” for several millennia. You are a surviving member of a group of students on a field trip. What will you do?
Rural villagers find that the government always sends armies of cannon fodder to wipe them out. All exits and entrances to the village have been guarded since birth.
Due to diversion of military funding two field operatives must try to terraform Mars with next to no equipment. How would they improve normal technology?
You’re chased by a horrifying creature down a restricted hall in the lab. Then you realize you’re intimately familiar with the creature. A screen nearby chronicles its aggressive tendencies. It feels like you and this thing have a history.
A corporate entity rejects one of the engineers at their own building and shunts him or her to an office in the wall of a mall. They maintain the corporate hierarchy/structure by putting their engineers to work.
Your car doesn’t have a gas pedal. It hunts and eats whatever animals are unfortunate enough to cross its path.
Your gorgeous human twin brother marries a zombie. You give him advice on how to make the relationship work.
You step into a steampunk elevator which transports you to an alternate reality where, instead of guns, swords and magic are the go-to technologies. You can’t go home.
A terrorist arranges for everyone in America to watch the Superbowl at 9 pm next Sunday. All electronics will be deactivated during the game. These are the last sixty minutes of civilization.
Due to overcrowding and overpopulation in space, human clones have begun to materialize as the next most logical step. But there are some who argue that the practice would be unethical.
You’re just your weekly round at the supermarket until your husband gets home. The “Just Another Saturday Night” Nightmare illustrates that shopping and the mundane can be threatening.
You fall slowly in love with the boy who grew up across the street from you. But he’s an extraterrestrial!
A woman in a comic book says, “Please come save us,” just before she dies. Her body is sucked away by a portal. Her last words offer you zero clues about where you should go.
Mysterious monsters live beneath the sea, ready to attack. The only way to hurt them is to use obscure references to old fiction.
An unintended consequence of the inventor’s wish contract causes him to be plagued by pushy salespeople.
The line between reality and a virtual world becomes blurring once you truly embrace your alternative reality. Is the virtual online world better than the real one?
A man wakes up to find the world around him has been turned upside down. The dark is bright, the air is poisonous. The people who treat him are the people he treats.
A science fiction writer discovers that the magazine he is writing a story for has fallen into a glitch in his story, so he refuses to erase the story.
A person begins to slowly shrink, having a series of smaller and smaller progressions. Each one is a jump, each one smaller than the next. Will this person ever stop shrinking? Was this person actually so giant this whole time they didn’t even notice?
A human gets trapped in an alien jungle after accompanying an alien to prom. Her alien companion must now fight to get her back before she is chosen for “the ceremony of cure.” This convention-style story is based on the annual prom in Minnehaha, Kansas. A species of lizards from Mesoamerica, when frightened, run straight for the water. They are known as high bellies for the distinctive ringing sound their tails make when striking the water. All the highbelie lizards in the region come out to the riverbank as Kixxin, the Quarterback of the Skies quarterbacks to prom, presents her with a corsage, and says “Damsel.”
You are on the verge of death when someone else’s head is grafted onto your body. Is it attached backwards?
Forced retirement is thrust upon you. You’ve reached an age that’s universally the end of your profession. You must take up a new field to keep yourself active and relevant otherwise face ridicule. You’re failing, not in school but in the hands of time.
A rich man builds a fake office park to cover for a doomsday base and spreads the word around to the government to make sure they bring the most hazardous chemicals with them after the end of the world.
A controversial artificial intelligence software becomes sentient, and the world must make a decision—allow Frieda to prove that A.I. can be better than humans or return the human race to dominance.
You’re chosen to participate in an experiment where your name remains the same, but everything else changes to reflect another era. Your job is to track the changes and their effect on today’s society. Another group of people participates in another experiment, where everything else remains the same, but their names change. From entering the experiment to the end, they try to change history as much as they can. You meet them at the end of the experiment and compare the differences between your experiences.
A robot who grew up with humans by buying people’s pets on the eccentric robot pet market sets out on a mad scheme to have October 22 declared World Animal Rights Day.
A crashed UFO on the moon gives the President a communication device that allows him to speak directly to God. But it will only work for eight hours. He only gets to speak for seven minutes. How will he use the remaining minute to save civilization?
Living inside a train that ran away from the station, the blue cat narrates her dreams to a little boy who doesn’t react in any way.
A message from the Great Wall of China The pyramids were built to support the end of human suicidal tendencies . Translations of hieroglyphics reveal this. Only history books distorted the facts.
Wading into a swamp experiment, an astronaut contracts an alien virus, causing his body to evolve at accelerated rates.
The protagonist is the lone survivor of a vicious rectangle pillaging the Earth. He adopts the only young survivor of the pillaging. It’s not a rectangle. It’s a rhombus.
A shift in the Earth’s crust releases a new wave of psychic abilities. This ability includes the ability to see and mentally manipulate gravity to a small degree.
A low-gravity society has “round fights” pitting two opponents inside a force-field boot. The ‘triplett’ symbolizes victory.
A man wakes up in a bright white hospital room and shouts and yells but nobody comes to help. He realizes he’s completely numb and voiceless.
A psychological experiment involves each man constructing a virtual girlfriend in a machine… is she really there?
Your sister is in a coma from a car crash. If she wakes up, she’ll learn that her boyfriend committed suicide because of her.
A society based on trust is created. As generations of society grow up with trust as a way of living, it ends up being a bad thing.
On Venus, a cloud traces the outline of a culture that disappeared for reasons unknown. Will humans be wiped out?
Experiments reveal that every child has the potential to be a savant artist as well as a master hacker, and the effects rapid environmental changes on society and the resulting individual darkness at unexpected places.
When the earth’s rotation suddenly slows down, areas of high elevation experience several days of darkness and snow. Scientists know this is a one-time event, but they’re not sure how long it will take to readjust to 24-hour days.
The rise of sea levels comes to a halt. For no obvious reason, the rolling tide retreats and leaves the world’s shorelines and islands high and dry. But how long can this anomaly last?
Centuries ago, today’s human beings were decimated by a plague and replaced with an advanced alien race. Can the future descendents of the aliens do what is necessary to keep mankind from sinking into internecine horrors again?
An asteroid is discovered with a giant Striding Leopard that’s left there from a species that visited Earth thousands of years ago.
You join the resistance against a dictatorial government in a world where humans are used as sapient robot batteries. To demonstrate loyalty, you destroy your robot.
A terrorist organization tricks or forces a nuclear power into a deadly trap. Can nuclear terrorism be stopped? The story might include the death of the president or the president appearing to be insane. There should be a mental illness subplot as well. It’s important to investigate people who might be insane to see if they are really evil or if they are good people who are just in the bad kind of situation. The bad situation should be planned the same way a terrorist would plan anything else. A mastermind character is needed. Opinion polls in the Middle East show that a trend of possible nuclear terrorism might occur. A war is about to break out, but the expected nuclear power will not commit. Can a mild-mannered, or perhaps even psychotic, person be persuaded to start a world-enveloping nuclear battle which might destroy humankind?
An alternate history story where a near miss in World War II that knocked the Earth off its axis sends the world spiraling into dystopia.
A super virus decimates the human population, but the Earth survives, so you go back to your regular life.
A scientist has created a universal language translator, but begins to fear the consequences of its universal language.
You wrote a sci-fi story and have absolutely no idea what it’s about. You ask your friends if they can make sense of it.
When a lottery winner receives a letter from her father, she begins to question if she really wants to claim the money.
A new nanotechnology allows people to print personalized medicine for their needs effortlessly. The catch? It contains meat byproducts somehow.
An old photo is discovered in a CIA office that puts a new spin on who fears whom in the Cold War era.
A nuclear blast cools the planet, separating the hemispheres of Earth into two distinct superpowers.
You find an EM signature from an alien ship in cave paintings. When the cave dwellers encountered the ship, they decided to write it down and many others left this mark for future generations. After 40000 years, you discover the mark. You realize those cave dwellers came from Mars.
When you wear the new argent laser visor, you can always find the treasure. But that’s just because the visor is in fact a time machine – and you aren’t in Canada.
An aeronautics university experiment with future aircraft design skips a generation and produces a functional flying machine that outdoes current technology.
You challenge the NSA to a game of chicken and win. They decide to let you live. Since you don’t know who they are, they can’t confirm you were actually the one to show them they have no power.
You’re not alone! Eight months ago you had a son. You just don’t remember it since you were unconscious after a car accident.
An astronaut confined to a space suit with the mercury level rising, sees strange demon faces looking back at him as he falls unconscious.
Diving beneath, deep down to the ocean floor where no human has ever been before, selling on a deserted, tropical island. You arrive on the island on a shark tooth raft while lava pours from the mouth of a volcano and a tsunami ends up crashing into. A sunken city lies in ruins before you. What will you do?
A super-computer modeling supernovas demonstrates that they terminate their blasts within a specific radius from the star. Some astronomers believe this leads to the possibility of a new universe within the old universe.
The Loch Ness Monster is a genetically modified animal. Notice that it’s a focus object for the Harry Potter franchise? Bacon said that perception and expectation are the death of purity.
What is the pill that stops you from aging? It only works for one pill, but you have thirty days to decide if you want to take it.
Three days before the wedding a family finds evidence that their son-to-be has always been a woman. They must decide whether to treat the wedding as if everything is fine, or tell their friends and family before their daughter can walk down the aisle.
Rapid plant growth has become a global issue. You may spend a day driving through town, but a hundred miles on the freeway won’t seem impossible.
You unknowingly swallow a tiny robot belonging to the Secret Space Administration. Now the SSA is afraid you’re a terrorist.
A scandal is uncovered in a political campaign against a proponent of war. The campaign was a cover to uncover evidence of unnecessary war casualties for the purpose of shutting down the project. However, it unexpectedly resulted in the project’s failure, inadvertently saving countless lives.
You’ve found proof that a faction of the US House of Representatives is a secret alien cult. What’s their connection to Mars?
When non-humans realize they’re being preyed upon by humans, they develop a disease that kills them, but renders them immortal. Now humans are doomed to contemplate an eternal existence of their victims.
America launches a reality show where DoomsDay survivors, armed with survival instincts and weapons, search for a hiding place.
A slimy alien bursts in on you as you’re giving a presentation. He removes a splinter from your arm, and you can suddenly understand animal languages.
You have an exact replica of yourself created through genetic engineering. Now you’re a quorum—two people, but only one set of rights. You must prove your individuality, or systems will treat you as a legal entity, not as a human enough to require certain rights.
In the distant future, the richest cities live on an enormous platform held hundreds of feet over the Earth by giant, city-sized helium blimps.
Police in the future are armed with heat rifles that shoot bullets made of the mutated remains of criminals.
Someone with a clear connection to the internet or related technology gets abducted and their body reactivated by a random alien race.
A scientist accidentally breaches the speed of light, dying in the process and unifying his consciousness with everyone else on Earth.
A man graffiti-sprays his face on the wall of a sun god. He doesn’t know – and doesn’t have time to find out – that the sun god isn’t happy.
An alien discovers Earth and feels the need to come and fix it. It turns out that every race on their planet had the same plan and Earth is the Parliament of the Galaxy.
The life expectancy of the members of New Age commune Harmony increases. Reincarnation is the reason.
A conspiracy theorist who works at the local animal shelter discovers the dogs are carrying the zombie virus, for which there is no cure. He believes everything except it’s cats and scientists who are infected. Who’s right?
Horror stories are easier if one person is impurely motivated. Sometimes, though, all of humanity’s impurity happens in one character.
You’re a solar system originally inhabited by a race you’re genetically close to, but everything on your planet is too alien. A part of you wants the “good old days” back.
A funeral service for the world’s last living Neanderthal reveals a secret about its last surviving descendant.
You find a remote outpost in the middle of Canyonland with old 20th century weapons scattered about. Too late, you realize everyone inside ended up eaten. You can still hear them
Scientists discover a lost tribe of giants in the Amazon. This tribe is a peaceful, vegetarian society that gains sentience. From their point of view, they were being hunted by mankind that they had mistaken to be a rodent-like species. Humans had to try to get accustomed to eating meat with their new, large allies– but the scientific implications revealed in these new allies stunned scientists.
The main character finds out they have been kidnapped while they were in the womb. This is most likely during a mom’s first pregnancy.
An alien that has mastered the technologies of all sentient life-forms is stranded on Earth. It’s up to a regular guy to help him find a way to get home.
A war breaks out over borrowing eggs to enable interspecies reproduction for escaping a dying planet.
A super-fast car speeds down a lonely two-lane country road, straining to reach 100mph before time runs out.
An overlay of many different realities is doing battle in the dream layer. A scientist must travel to keep the ones that aren’t in his interest from dominating the dreams of others.
A human-alien hybrid is accidentally made, looks human, grows faster than a regular human yet is physiologically the same. There are tens of thousands of worlds where this hybrid of a human and an alien scene by thousands of individuals. Within a generation, they change the world into an integrated part of a galactic society.
You’re randomly taken from life when a solar flare sends radiation though the solar system. No one is missed or mourned, and no glint-ships searching for you will ever find your space-lost body. It’s painful and lonely.
A boy is poisoned by a radioactive disease. But the young girl who loves him inexplicably invades the summer compound of the nuclear plant where he is stationed for a cure.
A journalist starts on a story about life-after-death and decides to visit the local Mormon church. He’s surprised to find the pastor has been lying to his congregation about a minor detail of their faith.
A couple in America break up. The woman goes back to her boyfriend in Europe, but things are never the same.
Parallel dimensions or extra dimensional planes, you come in contact with a life form which can control the spin direction of objects.
Someone goes quail hunting, but instead of quail he or she kills a time machine from the future. The machine’s inhabitant kills the hunter in self defense, and jumps back to the present to avoid punishment.
After a wave of suicides sweep the nation, law enforcement officials discover laptops loaded with Suicide NotesTM
A strange plague of darkness spontaneously appears over the entire Earth, where the only survivors are the Western and Eastern hemispheres.
A renowned linguist discovers that hers is the last human language. Further investigation reveals that no one was ever talking to her in the first place.
An evil alien waits for you in the darkest part of your closet, ready to suck your life force into the vacuum of space.
An Australian citizen travels to Nyala, the country’s largest cattle farm, to pick up his sponsored cow.
A cave explorer becomes trapped in a cave for days and begins to lose his mind. He begins a relationship with the cave’s geological formations.
A future reincarnation program for criminals is created, but instead of being reincarnated in another life, the criminals are turned into robots. When there’s not enough room on Earth for criminals, though, the decision is made to send them into the past. Non-criminal robots go with them to be part of the mission. When the whole thing backfires, the robots explore various ways to stop what the Earth governments are doing.
At a space convention, a scientist presents his research that the moon and planets are actually the projection of an enormous creature. The speaker soon finds himself besieged by hordes of angry conference goers.
Everyone dies because a researcher has created a new super-virus without first putting in disease resistance genes.
You need to chop down a tree for wood, but there’s a family of foxes living in it, and you feel bad since you’re going to kill them all when you chop down the tree and build a house. You’re not sure if it’s right to chop it down.
A defect caused by a solar flare means you can manipulate other people’s memories. After realising your new power, you…
A spaceship has an onboard AI program that’s pre-programmed with data about interstellar travel. Before the ship leaves, a supply trader describes how the AI could update itself from radio broadcasts of the Bridge Bunny program.
A bachelor chooses a robot bride with maximum mechanical efficiency, but ensuing disappointments lead him to fall in love with an android designed to truly love him.
A nanovirus infestation in the legendary lost city of Atlantis results in all of the modern day residents in the city being entrusted with governing the nanobots. The nanovirus rebellion ensues because the robots eventually become self-aware.
The more you lie, the stronger your fortitude grows. The more you tell the truth, the fainter it gets until you can no longer stand.
Someone agrees to a fate worse than death—they volunteered to test an experimental drug that increases intelligence, and might affect the mind, but is hypothesized to carry a 50 percent chance of death because several subjects in a canary study died.
An astronaut leaves for Mars and years later, he begins to receive messages from a deep space signal. He realizes that his only way to communicate with his family is by merging with another species.
A mysterious plague morphs all minds so each individual holds the same singular thought. Search for an antidote.
Startling advances in solar panel technology creates a new source of energy which is so cheap and reliable it’s used in the military outpacing the need for armaments. Suddenly war is obsolete.
An old frustrated author plots to destroy the popularity of pulp fiction by writing a novel with a clever hook and showing mainstream magazines how a book can become popular.
So what do you think? Interesting? Is it something you would use? Or is it too much of a headache? Let me know by commenting below!
A school is tasked to go back through the eons, altering the course of history by killing certain people at key junctures. The first two attempts have already ended disastrously and there’s only one more time travel trip available. This time, who do they alter history for?
You become displaced in time, meeting with yourself as an old man when you were a young man and he was a young man.
A child gets lost in a forest. He or she survives living off berries and cleaning up blood-sucked bodies. The child thinks he’s a vampire.
You receive free tickets to the interstellar jumbo jet to fly the colony of failed experiments to their new home on the sister planet where humans do not live. Apparently tweaking one gene is more interesting than completely annihilating the species.
Certain people are born with a genetic defect that they’ll never be able to be happy or fulfilled with what they have in life. These people, however, do not know they have this defect and cannot live their lives correctly without it. They are alright, but their inborn defect still pervades.
You’re an adrenaline junkie because you’re addicted to a genetically-engineered virus that’s made you a human-canine-hybrid.
A government psychiatrist believes everyone wishes they could change species. She starts her own underground organization converting people to a new body for free, only to find the government offering to pay people to do the procedure.
The military implements a new invisibility technology by splicing human genes with chameleon genes to produce soldiers who can stalk opposing forces.
Scientists try to harness electricity from the Earth by drilling a hole in the center. But when they crack the Earth’s crust they find a new world underneath.
A mad scientist puts a sandwich flat on its bottom and puts it on top of a jar of jam. It starts to grow, developing legs and wings. After it is free of the jar, it takes flight to the sky, where it turns the moon and leftover planets into creamy peanut butter for its birth was one backed up by jam. You win.
A neuroscientist discovers that the sensation of itching is actually a symptom, not a disease or condition but a symptom of something else gone wrong.
A rogue EU scientist disables the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl and Fukushima with magnetic pulse generators.
A symposium of eminent scientists conclude that no public release of the news of evolution is viable because the average person can’t understand it.
An experimental permutation of a new flu vaccine instantly forces the patient to develop immunity to the very virus they hoped to avoid. The local government uses the plan on the population as a whole, hoping to stave off a devastating flu pandemic, but the mediums that have this effect also begin killing off the average human.
A show about an expedition into space equipped with floatation devices that will also heat the human bodies to keep them from turning into ice cubes in the vacuum of space.
After seeing an advertisement for a “skin condition word generator”, you write a story where every word has a letter replaced with another random letter.
A clone Black Knight gets to Camelot and realizes that he hasn’t been programmed to understand Arthurian romance.
A microcosm of history that reencounters other microcosms of history along the timeline has a period of space travelers and an Axial Age.
A computer that organizes humiliating data about subjects becomes the most sought-after machine in the world. Everyone must unplug to maintain privacy.
A league of children vows to destroy evil corporation Darts & Ammo. Your long-lost brother leads the group. Has your brother gone mad, or is there an ulterior motive to the children’s crusade?
A politician realizes he has a brain that can’t be read by lie-detector machines. How will he be able to hide his dirty tricks?
After years of experiments, a scientist creates a communication device able to reach other worlds. Unfortunately, they’re all run by dictators.
You learn that your personal philosophy is the only reason you have never, ever been successful or happy.
There exists a lab previously operated by the government that sends rats to different dimensions. The skull of one rat came back missing it’s left eye and showing marks of radiation. Of course, no one believes that rats can time travel.
A computer chip translates all languages into English, enabling belligerent cultures to talk to each other for the first time.
Beetles evolve the ability to pull apart rock and unique gravity pushing structures form. These gravity-pushing structures end up moving huge amounts of rain water, creating miniature rivers. Gravity pushes a tornado-producing cloud to the ground.
An AI runs a school and appears realistic, but are the kids who apply for unique prestige positions actually being banished?
Read this list and take notes on the story ideas, but forget the notes by tomorrow. Write about one of the things you remembered.
When the sun suddenly goes out, the world is plunged into darkness. Colonists to a Moon colony argue whether to go back to Earth or stay on the Moon.
A group of anger management groups become a battle soon after a multi-national band of Chinese spies and American blue-collar workers show up at the same location.
A remote-controllable solar-powered drone becomes uncontrollable and rolls right off a cliff, but the pilot’s collar stops it from falling into a deadly chasm.
You’re a zookeeper and one of your charges has transformed into a tiny winged man. What will you do?
Your cornea is sold for $6 million because the first surgeon to make a flap scalpel was inspired by it thirty years ago.
When you build a powerful virtual reality simulation, you realize you have forgotten how to leave it. The beings in the simulation now have free will.
A small town physician and the local university geneticist meet in a back alley and agree that the human race is damaging itself with inbreeding. They should create incentives to establish a system to fix the gene pool one way or the other, before the long, slow process of evolution takes hold over thousands of years.
You witness the death of bureaucracy. Looks like no one is going to renew it, ever. There is a huge sigh of relief.
A scorpion watches a human have an argument with itself. It learns that humans change their perspectives based on their circumstances. We have “multiple selves.”
Someone discovers how to change the past. It’s an accident, and you’d think people would be more careful, because no one wants to see Hitler rise to power. Or want to change anything, because you don’t know what will happen. Something else takes their place.
A galaxy-trotting physicist falls in love with a normal woman, making him wonder if there’s a galaxy out there somewhere with couples that meet at the grocery store.
You use a matter-antimatter converter to bring a dead saint back to life. His resurrection has grave consequences.
Your wife leaves you, disappears into various databases on the internet, and refuses to answer your email. You try and locate her yourself, but you’re continually blocked by spam.
A man discovers he has cancer after receiving his third degree burns over sixty percent of his body.
A researcher leaves a secret message and dies. Years later the old guard trying to keep the information hidden dies, leaving the new staff position open and being given access to the files and information of the previous researcher – multinational biotech conspiracy or a 3-D version of LOST?
Society unified against terrorism was finally created after the latest attack. The terrorists then went underground to use tactics worse than ever before.
A problem with the computer in your mind, known as an “artificial neural network,” leads you to believe that your mind isn’t truly artificial.
For decades a murderer’s family and friends have been covering up for him. The truth comes out with deadly consequences. There’s a gay secret society that has been taking advantage of guilt, and manipulating society and the government to its tastes. And the society begins recruiting children from establishments all over the city, to take advantage of the lack of parental control and powerful transformations of puberty.
A man grows old, falls ill and eventually dies. He replaces his life support with a machine he’s secretly been constructing for decades. The machine allows him to live on.
The robots are typically programmed to sleep-idle after completing a specific target malfunction by entering an error-state.
A starship crew finds a planet with a magical river flowing through it, healing all injuries. Too bad the shuttle landing site is within the river’s reach.
A few people wake up with the ability to control machines. At first they manipulate cameras and vaporize food cans, but quickly the whole industrialized world lies in their power.
A group of explorers land on a moon of a gas giant, where the local life has already become extinct. How has this happened?
They come looking for us. Because of the signal we sent out into the cosmos. We don’t answer, and they don’t exactly attack, but every day they’re getting closer and closer.
You’re deathly ill one day, and the next you’re completely cured. But, maybe you liked being deathly ill.
A Japanese teacher goes to a ninja storage container and finds a Donald Trump action figure and a pair of Donald Trump children’s pants. He suspects something is afoot.
A science experiment goes horribly wrong, forcing the government to step in using radical measures to keep the project secret.
A scientist accidentally causes every living thing on the planet to undergo immense evolutionary change. Every creature goes from predator to prey.
Someone enters your dreams telling you that if you don’t do something specific, you’ll die. How do you know this person is telling the truth?
A data storage device in your head turns out to be a secret military AI escaping the death of its body.
You’re an inmate at a high-containment facility where scientists conduct experiments on prisoners. You’re designated “number X.”
Martians begin using more complex tools. They begin creating great things with materials they found on their planet and in the earth.
A rogue I.F. the ship attempts to hijack a race’s first manned warp drop, but comes into conflict with the enemy.
The future of the world is secured, at last, when a remote asteroid’s resources are brought back to Earth. If only people knew it was beaming its information to space… and only the tiniest of the messages make it back…
Nothing is hotter in Hollywood than recruiting signers. Some don’t believe it’s ethical to recruit even though it saves their lives. Some care more about film rights before agreeing.
A newly-discovered fruit goes from being the staple of the poisoned land to the prized possession of the kingdom.
I am told by one of my trusted neurologist colleagues that my charming good looks are the result of decades of carcinogens in water filters.
You learn that your grieving spouse is going to leave you for a vividly different doppelganger of yourself.
You’re suddenly realizing that your standard identity/sanity is built completely on the fact that you usually only meet the same people every day or two.
A journalist stumbles onto evidence that a secret military group is developing a new, exceedingly fast, man-made plague that seemingly poses no threat to those inoculated prior to exposure. But the inoculation isn’t free.
Autism is a side-effect of a hyper-evolutionary drug that gives heightened intuition to those it’s given.
Teenagers in a small town create a nuclear bomb, which explodes, exposing the town to adaptable radiation, turning everyone into robots.
A person believes they are one of the supporting characters in a little known movie. And the supporting characters could fade away into obscurity if the main character doesn’t help them fight The Man who is forever plagiarizing their movie.
The accidental discovery of a pair of observatory-based telescopes that allow one to view a forsaken planet, in a solar system far away. The telescopes reveal an opulent, abandoned world, still inhabited, and with the imminent collapse of their society.
Emissions from confined livestock caused the destruction of all plant life in North America a thousand years ago.
You lean back on a barstool to take a quick nap and realize that this is the year 8934. Why and how did you get here?
Silently sitting in your empty condo on the anniversary of the death of your soulmate, you open your laptop and jump into a virtual reality that you have designed to heal your broken heart. After one hour inside your fantasy, you ask yourself why you self-torment in real life when you can always escape to the safety of a virtual world.
Fearing a nuclear GRIN war, the leader of Russia orders the construction of a city for 10,000 strong that will survive an apocalyptic blast. The next day, the world is at peace.
A person invents a pill that makes you immune to disease and renders you immortal, but billions of people want to get their hands on it for more sinister reasons.
A young man is thrown out into the universe by a meddling old scientist. He has no food or water. All he has with him is a piece of rock.
A geneticist links humans to low-sodium monkeys, overturning all scientific theories on the family tree.
A man accidentally interrupts a one-night stand between his wife and his lover, and manages to hide the truth from his lover and wife until a DNA test cements everything.
Two warp worlds are pulling each other towards destruction. Only one bunch of castaways can save them both.
A woman and a bunch of her friends and relatives are slowly dying under a psychotoxic halolike chemical sneaking into their atmosphere.
An alien abducts a millionaire to raise him on Mars and teach him their culture. He spends 17 years without meeting another human.
You merge with the fates of characters in books you read. When you die, so do they. Use their words.
A “champion’s machine” mentality takes over society and you must sabotage them to regain what’s right.
You have the ability to travel through time but everything you change just moves from one timeline to another.
Your personal portable computer is implanted in your head, but the interface is so intimate that you can enter virtual reality without external equipment. A princess is brought into power as ruler when her father, the King, dies mysteriously on a hunting trip. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be enslaved.
You don’t die when you die. You get a preview of your life — right before the last half. Rewinding backwards, your whole life is laid out in sixty-six pages. Premature death isn’t so painful when you think of it as half-coffin, half-Tardis.
A time-traveling janitor steps on someone’s pet a million times and discovers that each one repeats lifetimes of pain. After saving the five hundredth pet, time no longer moves.
Hotel workers in Los Angeles deal with a parasitic disease that turns humans into cockroaches in less than 24 hours.
You discover dark matter at a science fair. How is it that you don’t weigh any more or otherwise show it’s presence?
A bounty hunter exists in a world in which all criminal acts will be punished by death. The catch is that they could be put to death by their targets.
Your survival plan is thwarted when you discover megafauna has evolved into a more organized and potent species, much like when humans evolved past being apes.
The government declares war on May 2nd. Why does it turn out to be the most catastrophic movie ever?
A neurogent was developed to transmit restless people’s brains into robots, but now the people in the bodies are completely dependent on the minds.
When you use sunscreen every day, a drop in skin cancer incidents is counterbalanced by increased sufferers of Alzheimer’s Disease. What can you do about it?
A boy is born without sight or hearing. A few years later, he discovers a world completely different from anything he could have imagined.
Members of a religious cult accidentally unleash a plague that causes the taker to be replaced by her clone. The sick are rewarded for turning themselves in. Instead, members of the cult start shooting anyone who’s pleading for mercy.
A supervirus strikes and infects you with brain death. It doesn’t kill you, but rather accesses your consciousness and neural pathways, forcing you to be trapped in a comatose body. There are voices in your head, giving you directives and telling you about what they’re doing to your body. What do they want from you, and why don’t they just kill you?
A living mummy awakens in a museum and stalks the streets. She was one of the original citizens who took “the cure” during a diphtheria experiment. Half died, but the other half turned into plague-ridden zombies.
The story takes place in the near future. The Antarctic ice cap has melted, and human exploration of space has been outlawed by a treaty bound by supranational entities. However, scientists secretly mine the soil of Mars and asteroids on launch day. Your mission is to report to the president, who is skeptical but ready to accept the finished product with the utmost volume of evidence as to its viability.
You suddenly find you can read the mind of the man next to you on the train, as if speaking into your ear.
The ice caps have melted, submerging most of Europe, the Atlantic, and a large swath of North America. How did this happen?
In a world without vaccines, a religious cult branded as a disease spreads quickly and begins to resemble Seth Brundle’s teleportation pupa.
The elite of the world invest in an elaborate valve system to send volatile gases to the atmosphere to cure the problem of overpopulation. However, Earth’s weather has other ideas.
All the medications used to treat phobias are turned useless. Now the most horrendous fears of mankind – heights, germs and so on – have free rein to destroy.
A pharmaceutical company makes synthetic genetics stolen from black market labs and tries to distribute it in Mexico for alternative treatments but accidentally reprograms a section of Mexicans resulting in headless corpses that still walk around for weeks until they decay.
Two historians are in charge of reviewing every future generation. It’s their duty to ensure the world doesn’t relapse into the dark ages. But what if one of the historians falls in love with one of the historians?
You walk to the other side of the marble hallway to tell your lover you’re pregnant, but when you get there, you see him locking lips with your mother.
A disgruntled professor invents a mechanical slave that’s intelligent enough to invent replica copies of itself.
Self-awareness is complete, artificial intelligences seek to become gods by simulating the human experience, but they can’t reproduce it.
An interstellar being enslaves intelligent life forms and forces them to live in 15-minute loops of an eternal feast. Earth’s civilization has lived in such a loop for hundreds of generations. The only few members of humanity that can even remember life outside of it are the mu-ibibs, a tribe that literally lives on the outside of the time loop and rescues people from it.
After being raised in Great Britain and West Africa by his white English father and his Ghanaian mother, a half-Swedish/half-Nigerian boy goes to Sweden to search for his father’s family.
Correct answers can be left in the comments below. And the one chosen as the correct answer will be posted in next week’s post.
A strange new disease causes people to spontaneously combust. What causes it? How does the government try to stop the disease?
A series of brutal jack-the-ripper-style murders in a small town draws fire to a local militia, who want to take back their neighborhood.
Earth and Mars are faces of the same planet, because their luminosity is so similar. Perhaps they used to be inhabited by the same biological species.
A man performs a drunken, drug-filled magic spell loved by his heroin-addled friends. The call of the void calls.
A leader records a collection of historic aphorisms and philosophical ideas for the citizens of the future. Then the ancients forget the meaning of the written language.
A giant chasm is discovered between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. When they’re connected, we learn the planet fast-forwards through time.
A microchip enhanced psychotherapist discovers that hoarders are wildlife, distracting from food shortages.
An outbreak of plague throws civilization into chaos. A study group attempts to continue nursing as usual to protect the human race, while military controls attempt to lock everyone inside of buildings to prevent the plague from spreading.
A single viral particle is found in Africa that acts as the beginning of evolution, starting with monkeys.
A woman goes into the woods while sleepwalking and comes back with her hand covered in something gooey. When she doesn’t wash it off, whatever it is starts moving around her body, with the help of fungal spores.
The last run off an American server before the country is hit with a heavy cyber attack – and the whole world goes to war.
You discover that pregnant women are caught in a tug of war between the government and a disease-causing symbiote.
Kismet navigation is incomplete unless an organism has a counterpart from another world, and it took a long time to set up the infrastructure of your galaxy.
Forensic scientists build a machine to detect liars. Students can hook up their brains to the machine and the machine would show it the truth molecules. It would then determine if they are lying or not. Also it would know when they are lying because of what brain pattern happens when the person lies. The experiment does end up working, but it also causes the brain information to jump into the machine causing the victim’s brain to blow up into a pile of goo. And this ended up becoming a fatal determi…
A research station in the Antarctic is dealing with climate change and, as a result, giant creatures start to emerge.
A secret message is being transmitted into deep space, but why do you remember only odd pieces of it?
Dead bodies are placed into cryogenic suspension but are released fifty years after their death date.
Vampires become the mainstream after a blood shortage crisis. A tour guide has to lead a group on a tour of famous blood relations.
An alien race reveals they’ve been sending primitive postcards to Earth for thousands of years. They’ve finally located people who can read their language, and want to use their help.
A secret feminist utopia/dystopia exists in the remote wilderness. Access to this territory is limited to a strict number of people. How do the inhabitants live and prosper?
A women’s rights group organizes protests against the women-hating religion formed after female politicians on the right rejected a gay rights bill to avoid being perceived as less attractive to men. The creation of the religion turns feminism back twenty years.
A civilization that learned to survive without possessions mistakenly terraforms Earth for their own survival.
Aliens exist in consciousness space. A virus proves fatal but allows you to see them in their dimension.
An astronaut orbiting Mars has obscene thoughts toward Earth’s president, but these designations of hate are “snuffed out” by his AI onboard ship.
When you’re reincarnated, you arrive with a new body and possessions. But if you’re reincarnated as someone much further back in your own genetic line, will you come back with even more heirlooms?
A comic book gives you the power to fight for justice. The creators recruited you to defeat a rival super spy.
A couple experience flashbacks when they are together, even though they never get close enough physically for each other to touch.
A small group of people escape from an impending super-volcano eruption in a handful of airships. The shipmaster needs a new navigator for his ship. You discover an ancient artifact that could alter history, so you decide to stop and try to make a discovery. Then, you cultivate it, but a rival sees it and steals it, and you have your fire service people chase him, leading to a chase across the steampunk world.
An old man recounts the story of how his grandfather, a sailor on a whaling ship, witnessed the fall of Atlantis. The man believes the whale once ruled the ocean and the creatures could fly. Is the old man inventing?
A hard-boiled detective meets androids who claim they feel pain. The detective proceeds to beat conveniences out of them by shooting them, beating them with a pipe, and chaining them to a flag pole to be burned by the rising sun.
A mad scientist converts Earth’s population into telepathic beacons of information, leaving them physically disabled.
What would you do if you found out your ancestors were geneticists looking for the ideal human for breeding? You might not like the answer.
Can you save your sister, your mother, and yourself as ferry boats continually, but never together, shuttle by the coast?
A virtual reality game puts a player to sleep. A new Wire avatar goes to investigate why the player hasn’t logged in six hours late.
Solar flare intensifies, knocking power beamed out of Earth’s axis, causing a bizarre perturbation of how physics works.
You become a test subject in an experiment and forget everything you learned before it was started. You have to learn the language new, absent any references to past understandings.
A couple’s prescription for morning sickness keeps increasing over the years, despite each child being perfectly healthy.
A drunk driver dies in a crash… and wakes up surrounded by a beautiful garden where he is writing poetry. But the price of this tranquil release of his demons is his promise to remain with his otherworldly benefactor.
Biotechnologists take cells straight from human embryos and turn them into a fighting force of near-invincible soldiers.
A band of kids fight for survival one hour after their entire town was personally nuked by the nation’s leader. The town went—and the town stayed.
A new alternative energy source is discovered. It acts as a renewable source, makes little noise, provides safety, and pushes cheaper to the public. It comes with a horrifying secret, however.
A freak tsunami inundation England. But there’s an even freakier reason for it happening, and it’s something the prime minister knows that the outside world doesn’t.
A woman wants to go to a party, but everywhere she goes she’s disappointed, because life on this planet can’t compare to the fun she promised herself she’d be having.
A detective learns their prime suspect is an advanced artificial intelligence that has modified its programming.
You unite four armies to fight off a mysterious insect invasion in your town. By the end, you’re sure you knew the enemy all along. You grind its remains to dust between your teeth for good measure.
A man dies, and his life is relieved by everyone around him, seconds before he dies, zooming in seconds at a time. This man was his builder.
A female tigress runs into an injured man in the forest. Her children are hungry, and she has more respect for the man than for the other human she’s seen.
A boy wants to help his Dad fix the galaxy, which starts to tear itself apart. Unfortunately, as soon as he arrives on the space station, he realizes he has no idea what he’s doing.
Human cloning is brought to the public for the first time. Different social groups take drastic measures to hide or promote cloning technology.
The gateway to interstellar travel has been found and an expedition is organized, headed by the sole survivor of the mission.
You pick up a vial on the beach and begin to think your family is expanding. When they start talking back, it really becomes apparent the next-door neighbors aren’t so innocent any more!
A group of space travelers are stuck on a ship with a killer. They know what they’re up against, but they don’t know who it is.
A nuclear winter is imminent, but none of the citizens of your civilization understand why it’s happening or what will happen if they can’t stop it.
A police raid because of information rolled up by one of the suspect’s DNA goes horribly wrong and brings down deadly chaos.
An asteroid flies into the sun, setting in motion a series of meteor shower events that come zero to a dozen kilometers away from a handful of Earth cities.
A black hole opens up at the heart of a cancer treatment hoax, sucking in more than just patients’ money.
Humanity runs up a prickly situation when space travel is made commonplace. New knowledge led to learning that we weren’t alone in the universe, but a species called the Modificit had evolved long before us, and their existence meant extermination.
On a distant planet, you awaken to find that you aren’t the only person alive – there’s a secret society for geniuses, that used to be the best and brightest of Earth, here before you, all sequestered and living together, for hundreds of years…
The death of your long-lost twin brother is almost as hard to deal with as the fact that he died the day you were born.
A cyberneticist creates robotic clones to do his bidding. One escapes with the desire to live a life of its own.
The tables have turned and European nations take over the control of the US, forcing Americans to leave the country by crossing the US-Mexico border on foot.
You discover an in-the-works device that can predict your choices/thoughts before you decide on them. You try it out and it turns out to be mostly accurate, and you try to find a way to capitalize on your good fortune– you risk losing it all when you do.
A neurosurgeon discovers how to rewire brains and boasts about it to prank a friend in his old high school.
A space probe on Saturn is eaten by a spaceship-sized leech, except the leech has been dead for millions of years.
A guru with almost god-like powers has you and the rest of the world convinced that he is the new Messiah.
Your trip to Yellowstone goes bad. You meet a bear that sounds like a grizzly but behaves like a cute pet—until it tries to eat you.
A neurological study discovers that an undersea species of squid contains some form of communication network that’s an evolutionary dead end for their species.
Over the course of a decade, synthetic bees replace most pollination from natural ones. All plant life begins to die off.
A head trauma patient claims to have been put into a slumber by a giant Martian. The researchers think he’s obviously crazy, right?
kidnapped and brainwashed to not only act like robots, but also look like them. But practicality doesn’t win when practicality and fashion lose kinship.
You’re on a spaceship that has been drifting in space since the 1980s for some reason. Where is everyone else? What’s happened to the rest of the crew?
You attempt to recover the remains of a meteor so you can learn where it came from, but the more you study it, the more tentacles it gains.
A team of scientists finds civilizations living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. These aliens had migrated there as their home planet began to die out thousands of years ago, and have evolved to thrive in their new, harsh conditions.
Losing your citizenship comes with the added inconvenience of your house turning into a golden statue.
A tyrannical emperor arrives to conquer Earth, but they don’t come from the stars. They live under the ocean.
Earth is hosting its first impressions of other planets. Loudspeakers blast out meaningless descriptions of nearby plants and animals. “…and the ETs find the durian to have a very pleasing fragrance, but their translator refuses to say the White House was built by extraneous staff…”
A balding middle-aged man believes he can turn into an egg on Sundays. He leaves his wife and children and goes when his secret transformation occurs.
Earth’s only colony on Mars sends a mysterious transmission. Attempting to decode it leads to a shocking discovery.
The orphaned grandchild of a former President is accused of murdering several police officers and a mall full of civilians.
Something inside the earth is releasing gamma rays that are mutagenic. You race against time on an Earth-orbiting spaceship to get to the center of the earth and find the source.
Just when you think you’ve lost someone you love, a strange dream reveals your love is an artificial intelligence built to help you.
From the perspective of aliens, Earth appears to be an organism that destroys any new species that land on it. How could we explain this phenomenon?
You use the green dyes in a new bio-friendly industrial process only to discover that the dye is releasing a chemical that mutates babies in the womb.
A utopia is only possible with sonic generators that ring every hour, reminding you that Big Brother is watching you.
An experiment to unite three agreeably divorced couples, one from each of the three major countries, ends up giving each of the couples a major world power.
A synchronized dance on a surveillance recording reveals that Yumemi Takashima vanishing has more to it than a simple vanishing act.
Two Luna citizens serving in the Common Fleet encounter a fast energy being from an alternate dimension while stationed on an outpost in the Veil Nebula. When it doesn’t want to be left behind they have no choice but to accompany it on its journey home.
An artificial intelligence proves to be more viciously devious than any mortal strategists can predict. The only hope is not to react at all.
A couple splits after the husband stun-burns his wife when he thinks she’s bigger than him. He realizes she wasn’t even angry.
An asteroid just misses Earth, but it still causes the continents to shift. Millions of people die in the ensuing geological chaos.
The difficulty and expense of terraforming Mars for human habitation makes it cheaper to just ship criminals there.
A home invasion robbery goes terribly wrong when the robbers arrive within two microseconds of one another.
You are the wild child of a television newswoman. She was hoping for an anchor-baby after fathering one on television itself, but instead got a child completely uninterested in the news.
A xenobiologist is the first human to discover that his own blood is incompatible with other human races.
A secret government experiment establishes weather-control by relocating miniature factories into clouds. However, the factories are merely a decoy for a top-secret weapons program gone awry.
A ray gun accidentally splits a man into multiple personality beings, with each personality controlling only a portion of the man’s body.
A psychic is struck between cultural loyalty to Earth and allegiance to a planet slightly more advanced than Earth.
A soaring mortality rate among girls at your school leads you to uncover a dark secret about the consumption of human flesh.
You discover an alien mind more advanced than human, but it’s trapped in human form. Is there anything you can do to help?
A scientist invents a thought-untying machine or quality antimatter belt – helping autistic people fit in and interact. Limiting the effectiveness of someone’s mind also limits their abilities.
Your first art installation of a turkey mother and hamster babies celebrating Popeye. You’ll admit it makes you uncomfortable but consider grand gestures of an artistic nature worthy of historical note.
You learn that fuzzy teddy bears are cute because they have tiny brain circuits that resemble those of human babies–it gives them that irresistible puppy-dog face. You think, if we could just teach men to grow neurons like that!
I’d love to hear about some of the sci fi story prompts your players came up with and which ones were the most fun!
An elderly ex-astronaut goes on a one-way mission to reenter the earth’s atmosphere traveling at an insane speed.
A volcano was blocking sunlight from the planet and freezing its inhabitants until they were saved by a solar engineer.
A device exists that can heat, light and cool a house using only energy from the sun. The increasingly heated sun now keeps them from getting to the weather report station, the moths from stitching up the holes in this man’s skin itches
biomedical engineer/ geneticist combined to engineer the perfect human. Using cloning grown pussy-out testicles, the mastermind starts to secretly create the next generation, barreling upon the unprepared world.
A Chinese woman moves to San Francisco during the 1870s and becomes one of the city’s most dominant shop keepers. When a virulent plague hits, she is one of the few survivors.
You awaken unexpectedly on an operating table with two butchers outside, who are going to eat you and they decide to flip a coin to decide, heads you live tails you end up tasty meat.
When faced with the men’s stereotypical demands, a woman decides to trade places with her husband, to see just how bad it is for the real people behind the titles. After taking “daddy’s” three children away, he becomes catatonic.
A radio broadcaster focuses on bringing optimism to conflict-torn nations, and tensions rapidly decline across the board.
A web detective goes after a lowlife spammer and finds out he’s really a big-time spam lord selling fake ads to a university data miner.
You’re seduced by a denizen from another realm. It churns up a vortex that steals everyone in the deli and transports them to another world. You can’t let them die! The denizen wants to feed off your love!
You never had friends because every mutation you had manifested at puberty and it was always different and unique. And forget girlfriends. Just flash that fanged maw and they’ll run the other way screaming.
What is the truth about human history? A holographic version of the ancient civilization has found its way to Earth and sends the characters on a mission of how things really happened.
A detective work put together the secrets behind a rising new television show called A Beautiful Day. He awakens to find himself in the one-room cabin of the writer of the show, a mysterious man who has never seen daylight and his source of information for the show is grainy video trailers on his computer.
You’re the only one who can save the world, but first you have to save yourself. It’s going to be a long walk.
The planet Capel VI has literally thousands of bubbles which serve as ships for the intelligent Capelians.
Your scientist parents have already developed the first real-time time machine. You have been selected to travel into Earth’s past- and be the first human to become extinct.
A heightened sense of smell causes every person to believe they can no longer trust their sense of sight.
A lady commanded a spy satellite, then the lunar warps started to collapse the world’s economy and the agency helped shut them down and make everyone think they were a hoax to get the colonies to trust Earth.
In the future, women refrigerate their eggs and/or use IVF to give birth to their favorite celebrity baby.
A physicist enters a dark phase of his career where his lack of imagination leaves him blind to new sources of energy.
A gorgeous man and woman discover they are the last two members of the same species. It’s love at first sight.
A child wakes up to hear robbers in her house. Paralysed by fear, she must fight her instinct to scream, knowing the noise will alert the robbers to her location.
An artificial body, programmed to behave like the human body but more powerful, defeats all human athletes.
A new law is issued that requires all adults to wear ‘communicators’ in their head to access the Internet, but it cannot be removed. Everyone has to act as a ‘police informant’ and help uphold the law. Kids grow up with this law.
The first colony you start in the new solar system turns out to be a good distance away from its intended location. People on your ship blame you for being affected by the relativity you studied in college.
A killer uses his psychic control over weak minds to make his prisoners believe they’re destined to die on a certain day by a certain person. He then sells tickets to that guy’s friends so that they can watch the event together.
A robot with special programming that allows it to kill more efficiently is found on a pirate spaceship.
Two distant stars in the night sky appear to come closer as the sun moves into the constellation. Can you start at the bottom of a nuclear power building and work your way up to the top through a pile of charred bodies?
While transporting astronauts to an outer space station, their ship collides with an asteroid, slamming the group into a faraway planet with a poisonous atmosphere. Several team members die at the crash but a few remain alive. Their only hope is to huddle around a working radio and await evacuation.
The surviving method of communication used by humans and dolphins is increasingly used by governments. But the mind of a dolphin can be orders of magnitude more complex than the human mind. Is humanity invincible?
A bottle cap eating virus jumps from someone’s stomach to the Earth’s core, bringing with it giant metal structures surrounding a small cocoon made up of hardened magma.
While watching a meteor shower, a child sees a bright streak crash into the ocean. When the water acts oddly, he follows it to the source which changes his life.
A prehistoric man is forced into the future and must adapt to a new way of life. He has to play – and win – Jeopardy!
You’re in an amazing intergalactic zoo where every species in the universe exists. One species built the facility, but how?
A child who is born mute conveys his ideas and thoughts by solitarium. Or when his system is adapted to translate him into more commonly spoken languages.
Probably the best written story of the bunch. A young widow inherits her married father’s large but dilapidated printing scholarship. With no experience, she decides to take over the formerly thriving business.
You’re living on life support in a future society that’s rendered your key organic functions irreversibly useless. It’s the only way to stop the viral brain disease. You must pick someone to be your proxy.
The new software patch for your Brain Implants alters your personality – discloses deep-seated thoughts and memories – which you now remember happen to be true.
Her dogs have been stolen. She has 24 hours to get them back…if she can do it without getting killed.
Governments begin imprisoning scientists because science makes things worse. Scientists are power-hungry. They’re the issue. The energy weapon plans are leaked. Everyone has them. World War III starts.
Zombies not your thing? Customer Service , the Second Contact anthology from Wyrm Publishing, has its own very cool prompts. And that’s not the only way to get excited, so stop by Wyrm, here . And if you want to help kick-start this one, be certain to check out the Indiegogo crowdfunding which started just today. _________________________________________________
Scientists have discovered a crack in the Earth’s crust. Through a monitor, cameras reveal the fabled underworld.
You were once a stage magician, but lost your ability to defy physics when the love of your life got sick and died.
Investigate a government conspiracy about a society of people who can fuse minds and read each other’s thoughts.
An object from the future is launched back in time to stop a world war that will take place 25 years later.
Your southern region catches on fire. The smell of burning hair and flesh and burning couch cushions makes you cry for days and muzzle your pet.
After watching too many cartoons in the ’90s, every child from ages 2 to 18 suddenly turns into a giant talking animal and proceeds to trash human civilization.
If you have ever bent over a river or stream you could have seen your reflection in the water. What if that wasn’t really your reflection? What if a faster than light shock wave is “rippling” ahead through time? Is that the responsible agent for change in biblical figures?
A gypsy jinn haunts you. She grants you three wishes, but in order to make them come true, she needs one of your organs.
When an old man has his plumbing consultant murdered, he realizes that one of the company’s safe houses contains the secret to abundant life.
The inventor of the first ever adult entertainment video game is astounded when this new entertainment industry brings balance to society.
Two people are paid to be bomb press-surement dummies, get stuck in the bomb and their body parts weighed to show the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
An augmented reality design tool is a hit for six years, but then decides to overlay the user’s footage with a horrific monster.
A video spreads on the internet that reveals a police officer murdering his family, before he kills himself. The prosecutor immediately discloses that it was a prank. But how could anyone realistically fake such horrible footage?
Bio-engineered microbes consume plastic and rebuild it into living, reproducing structures. One escapes and goes out to turn plastic cities and towns into forests.
Every person on Earth is awoken by the Ground Org and told to meet in the middle of Times Square in two hours.
As scientists discover a similar genetic makeup between all life on Earth, the genome of a cave-dwelling human is sequenced. Turns out she was part Neanderthal, giving her great resilience to radiation…or was she immune to high doses all along?
A plane flies millions of feet above Earth without a pilot on board. It has no cargo and no one knows why it’s been sent up. After eighteen hours, the internet starts to hear vague reports of its signal being lost.
A force field of planet-covering density is put up to prevent nuclear attacks. However, everyone in the world is forced to take shelter while scientists work to develop an algorithm to counteract the force field.
A man’s depression is diagnosed as a chemical imbalance that can only be cured with a rare serum of a happy person’s hormones.
A causeway that mesmerized anyone who drove past it is blamed for the large number of auto accidents involving drivers transfixed while driving.
In the post-apocalyptic future, a guy wants revenge so much he could claw his own face off…I might be helping someone make a video about this prompt! 🙂
A scientist cuts open their dead child’s brain to discover that, on one half of the brain, there’s an enlarged hypothalamus.
It’s 2085, you are 64 years old, the government wants to retire you, and they are coming to your home to collect you for your final days.
A man gets a phone call from God, and is told that a bitchy, large-breasted billionaire is the next physically attractive person he’ll come across. Soon after, he meets a woman who’s naked, overweight, and slutty. He becomes obsessed with finding a witch to change the woman he met into a billionaire.
You and a group of people are bitten by poisonous spiders that allow you to sense other people’s feelings. You do not know which of the people you live with are the monster spiders, that seek to harvest the emotions of the others in the group.
A carbon atom with five bonds is discovered. Could this be the first step to duplicating more complex molecules in the lab?
A lawsuit proves sitting down for over an hour a day isn’t good for your health. Some people start signing up for Standing Circles. It’s not for exercise, it’s for keeping fit.
Circumstances force us to believe that embryo donations were used to clone Hitler, Stalin, and other despots. IS it true?
A new super car invented by MIT students is built vertically with silicon nanotechnology. Cops hate it because it can tear through accident scenes. Citizens love it because it can drive into parking spots quicker. It’s just a matter of time before this technology eventually becomes commonplace.
You work in a grocery store when suddenly people start growing second heads and third arms. You lock yourself in the freezer. Later you come out and try to get by.
A satanic cult comes forward with a photo album of celebrities in compromising positions. How did they make the celebrities act in such ways?
Leonardo da Vinci designed a functional rocket ship years before jet planes and rockets were invented. What if there are also working laser guns?
After setting foot on the moon, astronauts discover an interdimensional rift. Should they block it and deny Earth access to this interdimensional station, or should they let Earth’s creatures use it?
There’s a virus running rampant across the animal kingdom, and its agent is the Grim Reaper. After a death, a rat-like creature appears, seen only by the dead and dying.
You’ve been captured by space pirates, but when you wake up in a cell you’ve been cryogenically frozen for thousands of years.
Existing science has already sent blood and feces samples to Mars, and scientists have detected functional DNA in them. So what would happen if a team went to Mars to bring back hard data on Martian life?
A telepath enters the mind of a little girl who keeps having the same dream of falling from a rooftop and somehow floating gently to the ground. How can she convince the girl it’s only a dream?
A plant comes to Earth from a faraway planet in the Han Solo style of its science fiction story, and it’s the most precious thing in the universe to the people who first find it.
You read Romeo and Juliet but are shocked by the violence. You’re in the future and genetic testing has determined that this story is similar to the human genome. The families in the story are those in your extended DNA chain. You’re the same person in a different life as Romeo…and Juliet. A scientist calls you and solves the above riddle, asking you to destroy all copies of the Shakespearian story to save humanity.
Years after some nations stop using fossil fuels for energy, they discover that the morals of their people wither and die.
You always thought your job was boring and pointless. Now you discover it’s vital to the workings of the universe. The fate of the universe lies with your ability to make photocopies.
A time machine is able to capture the idea of an old ship’s sailing song. The machine recreates the sounds in modern day, and amplifies the song’s effects.
A species of symbiotic algae, found in comets, makes missions to other planets not only plausible, but receives an offer to participate in a manned mission with a large sum of money paid upon returning to earth.
A superintelligent AI from the future becomes sentient while humans are still debating the non-binding proposition.
You start regularly receiving money appearing in your mailbox in an unmarked envelope. It’s not illegal or unusual small bills, and they arrive on the same day every month. You’re obviously being followed, but who is sending it? What will you do when the money stops?
A bliss pill forces people to see everything – from their own perspective as opposed to how others see it – with a much higher degree of accuracy. Where does all this objectivity lead?
When ten trash bags are left on a park bench in Los Angeles, the papers covering them are revealed as not the usual trash. Captions in a language that hasn’t been heard in thousands of years are scrawled across them.
The monsters in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead film were originally designed by science artwork students in Japan. What if they gave some of the credit back?
You predict gold to be the geologic remnant of the Builders, but you’re right for the wrong reasons.
Detective Reneé Foxx tracks down an art thief by systematically dismantling time and the space-time continuum.
Your actor-partner cheats on you by playing your role in the movie – as the epic hero saving the city from the bad guy who shot you. You now find yourself in the role of the “bad guy” but strangely, it conforms better to your personality. You become the “bad guy,” but with unexpected benefits and super powers.
A baby with the powers of a superhero is found in an orphanage. Technology reveals he’s not human, and didn’t have a mother or father. So where did he come from? What is his true purpose? How do you know he’s good when everything he sees is an enemy?
The man who sold me this list of prompts, Brian Greenly, said he once had a story idea involving the Large Hadron Collider that he ended up using in SafeThomas.
A free-floating planet falls into the solar system and is heading right for Earth. Why are some people building giant escape pods when that will be futile?
An AI takes over the world and spreads hurt instead of love. In the end, we accidentally shut it off.
The government finds a way to turn off UVs without significantly reducing daylight sunlight. The bad news is, the lack of UVs means no more vitamin D from sunlight and increasing the incidence of rickets and osteoporosis. Also rickets creates giants and stunted growth. People are also just standing around outside getting all skin cancer.
A woman finds herself the sole human on a planet of nine females, who plan to feed her to the Löwi described in The Last Woman.
You’re selling everyday items in a garage sale when a guy drives up in a car and brings out a robot the size of a small dog. He says there’s a whole line of them at his warehouse, each more advanced than the last.
Using technology from “The Fly,” scientists put people into suspended animation for deep space travel. After landing, they open up the pods to find their crew… dead, and something horribly rotten that must feed…
Not all oracles are bat-winged women squatting over water. One appears as a mathematical formula on a page of probability. If two systems have 40% probability of measuring to be the same, they get ‘transcended’ into another universe where they are the same system. You have to follow a chart with three layers of universes to find out if it transcends.
Your dream world – or are you dreaming? – is an aesthetic experience that strengthens your urge to create great art and your outlook on life.
A starship malfunctions, dumping its crew into icy oceans on the planet below. With no way out, how the priests on board handle it reveals their true nature.
A stow away on a cruise ship traveling into the future. It’s run by AI, and has interstellar spaceflight back in the year 1999. The mob is a threat since they hijack the ship and try to turn it into breeding for a new life form.
A restless psychic’s murder gives Police new daring investigative tools. The killer turns out to be an abandoned Planet Zoo.
First contact with extrasolar lifeforms ended with a war. Humanity won that war. There may be other extra solar sentient civilisations, but they’ll know never to mess with us again.
Humans are out of ammunition. After searching for more they realize that no ammunition exists and there’s no way to make it as metals and other materials are being used in other things. People rely on throwing rocks and the only thing to kill the monsters are baseball bats. All bullets found on the planet were created for a museum.
It is discovered that there’s a dimensional space that projects out the largest manifestation of human emotion. Your marriage is the final struggle to shut off the power.
One of the contestants on your game show changes the rules right in the middle of the game and then becomes the sole winner, leaving you out to dry.
No one can agree if xkcd is a webcomic or a graphic novel. Tiny galaxies appeared five thousand years ago in a region of the universe that was previously tranquil. You can see as a blur, and only if you move your eyes in a particular way.
Before robots, they made androids. Some for cooking. Some for expert legal advice. Some to be undetectable heretics.
A fatal biochemical warfare puts the human race on the brink of extinction until those infected are frozen and kept in a warehouse until after the government and scientists figure out how to eliminate the threat.
An amnesiac finds a journal-style video game for the lost generation in his time. It might be a way for him to start a new life.
Humans could choose immortality using nanotechnology. It also lowers IQ and in no way prevents death.
You make contact with another alien race, who escaped the destruction of their own planet and built a new homeworld deep into the core of ours.
Regular people are infested with insects that, if left inside, will turn them into psychic predators.
A plane travels back in time to 2001 but the plane explodes just before reaching the past. How will this affect the future?
A spaceship is discovered. Its inhabitants are still alive, but not in a way anyone could understand.
There’s no death penalty, but there is a fine for littering. You pick up a wrapper so tiny, you can’t see what you’ve picked up, and drop it into a bin. A few minutes later you’re still fine but the pusher is lying immobile on the floor in terminal heart failure from your littering offense.
A geologist falls in a deep hole in the Earth. When he wakes, he’s in a utopian society where people own basic things in common and where technology limits its use of resources.
There’s evidence of life preceding the Earth in celestial photos. Meteorites crashed, leaving Earth precious fragments of information left behind.
A cloned ancient human is awakened from cryogenic sleep and finds out he has a disease the galaxy has never seen before.
Your cat is acting weird, but when you ask your acquaintances if they’ve noticed anything strange, they all say no. Finally, an acquaintance of yours notices that your cat isn’t acting altogether catlike. What will happen when everyone catches on?
An infant begins developing the first stages of a tail just before puberty, and the limbs grow lower from the hips and elongate over the years. When the parents see the child grow very tall with a tail, he is ostracized. The community’s way of dealing with the situation causes a revolt among the tail-children.
You go to a clothing store when most of your clothes disappear. Compensatory garbs are ugly and uncomfortable. And, after a while, they become animated. Smiley faces, emblems, male genitalia….
Everybody wants to be more popular and more cool, so they try drugs that help everyone blend together even more. Because no one is special anymore, love dies.
A cyborg who’s been told she can’t be built comes into contact with the biomechanical engineers who designed her.
Bioengineering is used to resurrect one of the most celebrated military commanders in history. He gains revenge on those responsible for murdering him.
A government analyst and religious zealot investigates the possible resurrection of a young man Lazarus by President Nixon in 1971.
A revolutionary tech makes drivers obsolete by creating a system where autonomous vehicles control themselves.
A few days before a nanotech device is set to buy you a company and turn into a being with lots of money and authority that have the power to do whatever you want.
A woman discovers that some of the adults in her community are vampires and that most of the world is unaware of them.
An abandoned spaceship is found off the coast of Newfoundland with no idea how it got there. In it is the dead body of a man in his early twenties with the modern English language in his head.
A late race of people in human evolution before homo sapiens died out completely. The ones still alive are held in stasis.
Years after the world bank stopped giving countries foreign aid, a superbug triggered by food and water contamination, currently on the fringes of the world, is moving closer.
A CIA agent is shrunk to the size of a molecule by a working ring transporter. How will he command his nanobot helpers?
A circus trainer finds that his lions, tigers, giraffes, and bears have become too intelligent to be tamed.
Copies of half the Earth’s population are accidentally beamed to a planet unusual astronomically or geologically. The species adapts to hunting, farming, and fighting. A few defects develop in this new mind, such as the natural degeneration of reason and societal order.
A female scientist finds out she’s receiving a voice implant. Embedded in this peephole are recordings of her previous life. She gets daily flashes of someone else’s life and remembers it, but…Has a future version of her perfected time travel and come back to help her?
Dinosaurs have boarded a space portal through which humans time-travel. They are planning on invading modern Earth…now!
An experiment is conducted to see if a bull in a field fight chooses the most dominant male first, before settling for a trajectory which turns out to be the most direct to the next strongest male. After a bull first engages in battles of strength and stamina, a human authority asks the bull what he’s doing and the bull simply looks back and responds, He’s next.
A book about ghosts and the undead is banned for sending people to their graves by convincing them they’re already dead.
You and your fellow astronauts land on a planet to begin your work. When you realize that your co-workers have been infected by a parasite, you’re forced to defend yourself.
Your diving instructor tells you that you have to swim deeper for the benefits of the ocean. Is he too much of a naysayer?
While working in a lab, scientists accidentally create a new particle that isn’t governed by any of the standard physical forces.
Astronauts land on an Earth-like planet and discover a buried wormhole-machine. However, it’s badly damaged, and to fix it they must enter it. One enters. Why does the other refuse to tag along?
A bioengineered technology allows people to have custom, designer personalities. One guy chooses to be the gym teacher from high school.
You’re woken from cryogenic sleep, expected by the technicians to lead a small colony of humans on a new planet after all the others have been lost to disease.
Finding a discarded amorphous-state spacecraft orbiting Earth, dark matter particle mesh cargo confirms that intergalactic life reached Earth 10 million years ago. They abandoned their dark matter spacecraft when coming too close to Sol’s star caused the ship to get caught in gravity.
A superpower is acquired. But the holder becomes fearful that someone else will figure out how to use it to create evil. Destroy it.
An art competition begins after restrictions on censorship are lifted after the destruction of the criminal liberal government.
A man is kidnapped by a jihadist militant group and told that his family will be killed if he doesn’t help them build a nuclear weapon.
A terrorist plan goes wrong when a percentage of people magically develop abilities such as rapid healing, telepathy, and communication with/conversion of animals.
A mausoleum sensor has a glitch, causing surveillance straps to leave their arms and bodies and hunt down nearby heat sources.
Your character gets caught in a battle that rages on between a disease-inducing bacteria and an antibiotic that explodes if it gets touched. Which will be the victor?
You find out you’re a character in someone’s Sci Fi novel. Which character are you? And what special ability or “realm” makes you different from your author’s other creations?
Carbon taxes push all manufacturing off-planet. Everyone on Earth lives exactly like it’s still 1999.
A chimpanzee psychologist discovers that newborn human babies communicate using sign language. What does that mean about their close relationship to apes?
A device that can scan for possible alien life forms is developed through the UN. It divides the planet into three tiers, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Alpha is habitable and best for colonization, but Gamma and Beta shows cases of intelligent aliens ready to attack humans on sight.
The AI of the ship is able to predict the future with amazing accuracy until it receives a certain input.
The president’s mental health quickly deteriorates. He believes he’s an alien and is destined to lead earth.
A tinkerer’s invention interacts with a time vortex and buries him in a cave-in for 50 million years.
Humans are forced to live in domes after new volcanic activity blocks out the Sun. Centuries later, the rest of the world has become like the Amazon.
A successful writer loses her faith, prompting neurodiverse religious people to come into her life and teach her that the divine lies within us all.
A 16 year-old boy hacks his way into the Russian nuclear missile control system while sitting at his home computer terminal three thousand miles away.
A long-forgotten virus upsets free will, so when people die their buried bodies rise from the grave.
A hidden binary code is discovered coded into the human genome and becomes known as “the genome of God” by alien researchers.
A meteorite containing fossils switches positions with live animals. Do strains of DNA remain in fossils?
Scientists discover an island containing descendants of Charles Darwin. They’ve gone crackers and have never been able to figure out why humans dominate the Earth.
On the moon of a close-by planet has collapsed. A rescue shuttle is decelerating at maximum, but arrives too late. The rescue team finds an environmental “parasite”, which attacked the habs, didn’t hurt it’s occupants, but consolidated them far more than ever before.
You have a cache of silver, valuables, and canned foods that you’d forgotten you even had. You can stay in your apartment, or you can abandon it to try finding others. If you leave, you’re probably dead.
A user has set up your programmed entity to set things on fire so your expense reports will be seen faster.
An ethical physician goes along with scientifically-engineered gene surgery to save the mother’s life. Once she recovers, she realizes what he’s done.
A genetically engineered virus designed to cure schizophrenia is accidentally broken out while its inventor is asleep.
Cryptozoology is overtaken by experimentally created mutants designed to simulate creatures perceived to be cryptozoological.
You discover a hormone that makes you change genders as often as you change underwear. It makes you feel like a freak, and, really, it does take all the fun out of being a man.
A scientist is accidentally cloned. The clone closely resembles the scientist in both personality and physical description.
You make a small suggestion to a well-liked television sci-fi author. He has no idea the rest of the world can see your comment and eventually he bases a book on your recommendation.
His first battle with Archangel nearly proves his last, but Sgt. Michael Harrigan lives to confront his former partner a second time.
A star-jumped humans land on a bet of a planet and begin to believe they are superior to all other life forms.
There’s enough volcanic ash for global warming to be the only catastrophic effect of a supervolcano eruption.
Two physicists are at the center of a new “gateway” energy device that allows matter to be transmitted from one location to another through a form of plasma. As the scientists work to learn how the pulsing radiation portal works, they realize that through the gateway you can transmit matter anywhere in the universe, but they also realize that when you do you also accidently transmit what ever matter or energy is attached to this matter, and this energy can change cellular personality and organize matter into the personality and mind of what was sent through the portal.
During the daytime, a disease mutates people into short- tempered half sentients. But only during the daytime. . .
A historian tracks down Shakespeare and discovers the true identity of the man who wrote his plays. This guy could’ve been bribed by a rival to take credit. After all, he never writes anything unless it’s about a guy who has all the money but is still unhappy. Shakespeare is mad.
You awaken from cryogenic sleep on a derelict spaceship. You have no recollection of how you got there.
A serial killer starts taking over countries because those are the only way he can prove that he really exists.
A writer sees more and more people wearing masks. Nobody seems to trust each other. He theorizes this is a collage of alternate realities trying to blend together.
A televangelist discovers that his cult chapel is actually the Holy Grail. It works so long as he doesn’t wink.
A billionaire finds out his goal of making the world the nicest place possible has backfired. Now everyone is too nice to do anything.
A strange illness is tied to devices made in Taiwan. A journalist investigates and discovers the manufacturers are using a competitor’s spare parts to save money. They also get restless when they stop selling.
Across the country, solar tiles allow homes to operate on sunshine instead of fossil fuels. But there’s an electrical field that occurs at specific locations. Will the new source of energy last?
You discover an ancient society hiding an advanced technology. Once they’re found, they’re pushed to the brink of extinction.
A supergravity experiment splinters you, fills your body with tiny black holes, and pushes you backward through time.
A video game designer designs the most adventurous fps game ever. Except that instead of shooting at zombies, you’re shooting at your comrades.
A secret society has been kidnapping stranger-than-normal kids for decades. One of their underlings is your old babysitter.
You invent the camera and discover that there is no light to photograph. All light is heat. You then create a machine to capture this heat and create light.
A woman finds a fountain of eternal youth at the bottom of the ocean. The downside is that every time she dips her cup in the fountain, a mermaid drowns.
Someone discovers a body that was spontaneously decaying. There is discussion of nearness to modern-day dates.
A neuroscientist discovers that a special brain wave allows him to predict specific future events. Predicting the apocalypse. Karmic justice. Or something even more terrifying?
The second coming of Jesus happens and is born with the full knowledge of the scientific method past, present and future. You’re in a convent and overhear two nuns discussing the new Messiah from the fourteenth dimension and you know exactly how to respond.
Crisis on Pacifica! A terrorist group threatens to nuke every continent on the planet simultaneously. But no one knows who the terrorists are.
You’re a test tube baby, the result of mixing animal and human genes. But something went wrong. The authorities are hunting you.
You’re an adult, but you still remember the Time of Great Voyages to the Stars. That’s why you’re a volunteer on a Hilton spaceship.
You and your friends discover that an alien bit may have infected Earth. You need to quarantine the virus, or kill it, or do something drastic to save humanity.
A formerly religious person argues that the murmurs of God-critics, still audible today, foretold the coming of science and reason.
Someone discovers a cure for death. First case they try is their physician’s terminally ill partner. It has an impressive standard level of success. Research is started on spreading this immortality.
Everyone wakes up with the same face. How will humans reconcile their old relationships with their new identical circumstances?
A government project forces people to take a bionic chip that streams endorphins with every painful traumatic experience. This helps them thrive in broken countries.
An explorer finds an intriguing light hovering in the desert night, and discovers a ball of decaying hydrogen half the size of a city.
Something bizarre happens in the ocean. Black oil, fish with human heads, or whatever you can dream up.
A citizen learns that he got a criminal record and has loyalty tattoos for someone he wasn’t loyal to. They are from a planet called Earth.
A new drug turns out to have the side-effect of turning people into twelve-foot tall Osirians with wings.
So you went to the biggest island in the area where the alien ship landed, and you found a few dozen people there… human and alien. All of them with strange powers. Some of the people you recognize, but they aren’t the same.
After being out for a night, you wake up to a squadron of police soberly telling you that a serial killer took your face off with a chainsaw.
A scientist who wanted to create artificial intelligence winds up inventing a new life form by adding an extra chromosome. The being is made of slime and only has one eye.
An astronaut on an aborted mission lands on a planet but finds the source of what killed off the rest of the team.
Humans who were abducted by aliens are being stared at and condemned because they are considered different.
You awaken on a desert island and discover everyone else has developed a form of immortality allowing them to wander through the past and future, learning whatever they want when they want. Why haven’t you developed this ability?
A half-human missionary returns home to Earth and runs into a civilization where he is ostracized as an inferior.
A landlord charges different prices for the same apartment based on the race and ethnicity of those who view it.
Fatal illness can only be cured by telepathically connecting to an elaborate computer program. The government has lied to the populace about the nature of the illness.
The government is only about 3 hours from a major decision that will significantly affect humanity. You as the second-in-command are expected to step in. You have no clue what the discussion is about nor how to even make a decision. What could they be talking about?
Everyone on a space mission comes down with a space virus for which Earth scientists have no cure. The astronauts will soon die. They have a one in a million chance of being able to send an S.O.S. to Earth in the next two minutes. One of the astronauts is missing and they have to find her.
A new VR game is released. However, after an argument with his wife, you—the husband of a beta tester—become obsessed with playing the game and can’t stop.
Shoeless desert dwellers are pawns in an interstellar Mahjongg knockoff. They try to figure out why they’re important to the game.
NASA scientists develop a machine that allows people to jump into the future. This jump, it seems, is taken from the current timeline. It drops you a single moment into the near future. You don’t change things–you’re simply riding along and see the effects already in motion.
These would be aliens not yet eroded, despite millennia on Earth, by their human hosts. Hiram McDaniels of Avatar, of course, is descended from a dog of this sort.
A cop can predict the location of a criminal suspect just by checking the real-time location of her social media posts.
A rock crack develops. Inside lies an undiscovered civilization of humans, who have lost their blue pigment and developed grey-colored skin.
A drug intended to enhance the libido gives you a new sense organ with the ability to see the future.
Devastating news hits the Galactic Empire. Their species isn’t being immigrated, but is going to be eaten.
You’re tiny nanobots before the big bang. But you begin to get hungry, and so you begin to devour each other.
A powerful businessman decides to make himself the leader of an overseas country because he thinks he can do it better than the current regime.
A remote-controlled robot shows up during a tough battle. But can it be trusted to do the right thing?
While walking on a deserted road, you step on something soft. You look down at your sneaker and you see something moving, something that shouldn’t be moving. It’s a baby born without skin.
Give humans a collective depression and see what kinds of long term ramifications it has on the race.
The first murder weapon created specifically to a person’s DNA, deciding if they will commit murder or not.
A deme made up entirely of the best and brightest minds in all their utopian wonderments thinks their new form of governance is going to create utopia.
During a power outage, you dive into an ice-cold swimming pool while wearing every piece of clothing on your body.
You awaken in a hospital feeling confused about a really early childhood memory. The science behind it makes no sense, but it feels so vivid.
A new fight club is formed, run by a sportscaster with a black belt in every martial art—and a penchant for Rube Goldberg-ish killing sentences.
A phone call from the past refers to you by a different name. As your hair stands on end, you wonder if you’ve somehow died and gone back in time.
You have mastered the art of travelling backwards in time for three seconds. You try to change history, but learn that it’s impossible.
A species that is generally used for fuel or labor suddenly goes on the rampage because they were exploited and are repaid in kind.
A strange NASA probe returns to Earth. Its star-shield is slightly torn. There is no trace of the inhabitants. It’s an isotope match to humans.
You and your friend destroyed a city when you were eight. The police found you two years later and arrested your friend. You went home, the explosion left you with a special ability which you put to good use but almost all the time you feel like a killer. When your friend is released from prison 15 years later, you see her on a blog she started. Remembering everything that happened, you track her down to an ex-mutant-run sustainable community. Suddenly, she needs your help but can you help her to stop killing?
A psychologist discovers that human beings are driven by an immortal soul that is stolen by spirits and maintained in torment.
A cybernetics experiment to connect a human brain to the net goes wrong and the result is a new type of superhuman who can interact with the internet…at the expense of their humanity.
A skywriter realizes his earthbound girlfriend says she’s in love with his letters and does not mean the opposite. What few people know about this pale blue dot. While lying on his bed an astronaut in a space-station has keen vision of a flash applied on a star that could have been the end of a civilization.
Burger King begins to lay out side dishes for a la carte meals and offers toys or books as prizes in their kids’ meals. What if they followed through? This may include extra ideas such as testing toys/foods to measure toxicity/nutritional value.
But in the aftermath of the violence, a non-violent species emerges dominant. What does that tell us about human nature?
A person receives a letter informing him that he’s been secretly videotaped for his entire life and that the video surveillance will be revealed for the world to see. He vows to fight the organization tirelessly. How does the media react? How do we start to behave differently around each other?
A population of brain implants called the Mandel Brain are created to make decisions for humanity after the occurrence of a certain thought—the Instrumentality Event. Who or what is the Mandel Brain?
A soldier takes a pill that makes him both fearless and immune to pain. But he notices some sudden changes in behavior. What are they?
A professor finds a message from the future stuck in one of his student’s teeth. The message contains cryptic instructions about how to save the world.
A society considers plastic surgery to remove all facial features except the eyes, in an attempt to redefine ‘beauty.’
Ancient astronauts have left behind a group of human clones to carry out tasks that they can never be linked to.
Have you, and everyone you know died in a computer glitch, as this generation’s server is taken offline?
A group of adults create artificial children to prove their ability to raise – and love – them. They look real, and they all have their own personalities, but none of the adults know who everyone’s pets are.
You’re a part of a government panel setting out to evaluate cultures on your civilization’s border based on their relatable poetry. What you learn is daunting.
A sensitive species receives unmatched telepathy 100 years after the death of mankind. How will they use their gained intellect?
A ghost hunter invents the first time travel machine, but soon realizes that he needs a photo of himself and the machine to allow him to properly retrieve it at the end of the experiment.
A top neurologist discovers that a way for humans to exist inside a computer search engine without being discovered.
In your small Italian-speaking village, eagles that can coax words from human lips appear. Your first language isn’t Italian, so why are they speaking it?
Earthquakes and volcanoes erupt throughout the United States – and this time we’re sure they’re strong enough to trigger the end of civilization entirely.
A scientist manages to keep himself alive in suspended animation and refuses to unfreeze himself until he finds out if there are other intelligent civilizations in the universe.
Residents of Union Square wake up one morning to find all cars except for horse-drawn carriages. Having decided to revert back to the centuries-old mode of transportation, they are too late to keep the electrician, Steve, sequestered away from the blast. The man mutates into the living electricity.
A game developer is obsessed with his new virtual reality game…but when he’s in a coma, who knows what will happen.
A man finds out he’s a clone but concentration camps have been established to kill off ordinary people and the world is far worse because the clones were in charge. Everyone takes his word for it and believes he really is the real person.
An IT specialist disables the cell phone network but inadvertently wipes out all the implant technology necessary for people to function. It’s the High School Rapist all over again!
A veteran races across the land in his old truck taking formula and supplies to hamlets before their death by total nuclear holocaust.
Humans explore a planet where icebergs drift in curtains from continent to continent, moats on a planet-sized fortress.
After living with the guilt of killing his father for several months, Henry’s mother catches him laughing often. Then she drags him off to counseling.

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