58 Science Fiction Writing Prompts

If you’re waiting for the muse, she’s here.

This is your chance. To write carelessly. To ignore spelling. To hop over plot holes.

Take an idea from this list and run with it. You have permission to just write. For ten minutes. Or five. Because no one is watching. And no one is judging.

This is the time. This is the place. This is your inspiration.

Go for it.

The List: 58 Science Fiction Writing Prompts

1. You find out you’re a DNA experiment combining as many recessive genes into one person as possible. That’s why you’ve always felt so different from everyone else.
2. A man takes a vacation to another dimension only to find that everything he was trying to get away from, he’s brought with him.
3. Couchsurfing on another planet goes wrong.
4. A marathon runner illegally trains on a planet with stonger-than-Earth gravity to gain an advantage over his competition in the inter-universe Olympics.
5. “It’s not really a fly. If you swat it, they’ll just fine you and send two more.”
6. You think you’re chasing the last vestige of a prehistoric Earth creature, but it turns out to be an alien.
7. A woman disappears for three years and returns with psychic powers.
8. “If I can’t save her from the creaux, then no one else matters.”
9. The solar system is an ecologically closed spacecraft hurtling makind toward its ultimate destiny.
10. “We’re headed to Madam Maxime’s at the edge of the universe.”
11. An existentially bored man who lives in a smart house—where everything is done for him—pines for the Wild West where men had to fend for themselves.
12. A corporate analyst who investigates failed colonization projects encounters the strangest case of his career. It’s a ghost colony with no record of anything catastrophic or any indication of what went wrong. The people are simply gone. Just when he’s about to write off the project into bureaucratic oblivion, he notices something else that’s missing. Can he reconstruct the past from the hole it left deleting itself?
13. “I learned to stop time traveling today. I was doing it just to hurt myself.”
14. An orphan girl, desperate to make anything last, snaps pictures with a camera she found among ship wreckage. She finds she can enter the still-life photos without aging.
15. “We were always on the same page, even when it came to splitting for separate planets.”
16. A social worker in an impoverished planetary colony discovers a cheap way to manufacture housing for the homeless, but the housing material is on a corporate reserve.
17. A hobo finds the secret to true love tonic.
18. An old woman, fed up with the alien soldiers she’s forced to house, kills one who puts his muddy boots on her coffee table for the last time.
19. Women on Calisto colony are legally permitted only two children each. One man decides that one wife and two children aren’t enough.
20. Tired of stalled space exploration advancements, a scientist convinces the public that a meteor is on a collision course with Earth. In designing the fake “evidence,” it turns out the meteor isn’t a hoax. But now no one believes him.
21. A neurologist discovers that the human brain is wired to learn planetary physics during infancy. Is this proof that humans weren’t always Earth-dwelling?
22. Everyone on Earth falls asleep at the same time, except one man.
23. “You can see my love from space.”
24. Each child a woman births is a vote for that world’s continuation.
25. A girl’s dead brother contacts her through dreams claiming the afterlife is just another dimension.
26. A failing physics student accidentally discovers faster-than-light-speed travel, but his professor doesn’t believe him.
27. “No man on the planet has the key to the galaxy that we do. Join us.”
28. “They say there’s worms in the black. I never seen no worm. But I ain’t going back out there all the same.”
29. “You got the credits, we got the crystal.”
30. A time-adept species will serve your prison sentence, but you have to exchange the favor in the afterlife. An atheist decides if it’s worth it.
31. “Turns out separate planets wasn’t far enough.”
32. “He flew in here on his government-issue cruiser and stole my heart.”
33. A man decides to climb Mars’s Olympus Mons. He’ll finish in three years, just in time for his wife to emerge from cryogenic freezing.
34. A man with writer’s block attends a hypnotic dream workshop where his dreams will be recorded for story premises. Except, when he awakens, one hundred years have passed, and all his story ideas are already classics with someone else’s name on them.
35. A boy from 1920s America learns he’s actually in the year 2020, where technology is advanced and he’s a social study.
36. “Why grieve when you can keep your loved one encased in Forever Glass™?”
37. The CEO of Living Doll Corp has a crisis of conscience when a child drowns trying to save a doll that fell in a lake.
38. Scientists discover the key to human origins trapped in the polar ice caps after they melt. The message it delivers is a second chance for mankind’s irresponsible treatment of their home.
39. Gold-fingered gods arrive in chariot-emblazoned space crafts claiming to be the Roman Pantheon back from vacation.
40. A diaspora of humans evacuate Earth before a catastrophic collision. When the collision date comes and goes without incident, those left behind must decide what to do with Earth and whether to let the evacuees get away with criminal abandonment.
41. A virus attacks humans. The survivors, now fused with the virus, begin to remember a time before Earth.
42. Scientists discover a fusion phenomena in deep space. Like a black hole, but in reverse. The material leaving it seems to be the building blocks for all life in the galaxy. Is this the great mother of all life in the universe?
43. When the last courtesan training house is threatened with obsolescence, the downtrodden women of the Athena belt unite to preserve the last vestige of female independence.
44. Cassandra, a time traveling police officer, pretends to read her customers’ futures through Tarot cards because it’s the only way to convince them of the truth.
45. A man shows up at the home of an infertile woman who is desperate to conceive. He claims to be her son from the future. He needs money and an egg from her ovary to help save her life.
46. Men in a secret society on Earth decide to transform the US into a third-world country to make it a more exciting vacation spot.
47. When the capitalist class of Pandora moves to a remote third-world country, a group of unemployed journalists investigate.
48. A man in a refugee camp for memory loss victims starts to remember his past—that he and the other refugees were freedom fighters with special abilities. But he can’t access his powers without help from his friends. Can he help the others remember?
49. Faced with Earth’s imminent destruction, two computer whizzes design Earth Memory—a hub containing art, internet content, knowledge, written history, human DNA, and the two boys’ memories. They wake up with 100k other humans on an Earth-like planet where they must work to find out what happened and who saved them.
50. A boy grows up amidst “lost technology” with his grandparent’s stories about “Earth that was.”
51. Five intrepid teens discover that the wizard class who rule the country are really just masters of a minor technology that one of the boys has accidentally stolen.
52. A girl discovers an additive in the food supply that keeps the population tired, sick, and foggy-headed. After she stops eating the additive and “wakes up,” her success and seemingly super-human abilities draws the attention of the authorities who offer compelling reasons why she should keep her silence.
53. “After eons and light years of travel, I’ve learned only one thing of any consequence: there’s nowhere far enough that her memory doesn’t follow.”
54. “Ikaria isn’t a religious retreat. It’s a science experiment. And you’re the mouse.”
55. “I don’t care about bioluminescent lakes, dad! I like my sparkle in a glow stick.”
56. A man driven mad by a ringing in his ears discovers it’s an alien signal. And he isn’t the only one who can hear it.
57. An abandoned shack turns out to be a door to another universe as a band of local hooligans is about to find out.
58. A group of intelligence-enhanced lab animals must find a way to communicate before their turn in the euthanization chamber.

Got your idea? You’re almost there.

Transform your idea into a story with 5 Deceptively Simple Plot Techniques for Writers. Then polish it off with The Art of Brevity: 5 Powerful Techniques to Cut the Fluff from Your Fiction.