Your imagination needs a nice bit of push when you’re trying to conjure entire galaxies, future civilizations, or reality-bending technology from thin air.
Science fiction is the genre that offers those limitless possibilities. But time-travel, alien encounters, and the worlds where impossible becomes the reality can be a hard task if you don’t know from where to start.
That’s where these sci-fi writing prompts kick in. These prompts are your creative launchpad, giving you the cues or the sparks that you need for your next sci-fi short story or novel.
These prompts will give you “what if” scenarios that demand exploration and help you create a world or universe.
These carefully crafted sci-fi prompts are organized by themes, each designed to be writeable, thought-provoking, and uniquely yours to develop. There are no generic ideas, no repeated cliches. Just unique story seeds waiting for your imagination to bring them to life.
Let’s begin.
Table of Contents
👽 First Contact & Alien Encounters
- An astronomer receives a mathematical message from space that, when decoded, reveals the exact date and time Earth will be visited three days from now.
- A marine biologist discovers that dolphins have been communicating with an underwater alien colony for decades, and they’ve just asked humanity for help.
- Humans finally make contact with an alien civilization, only to discover they’ve been watching us through our television broadcasts and have some very wrong ideas about Earth.
- A teenage girl’s imaginary childhood friend returns on her 18th birthday to reveal she was never imaginary. She was an alien observer preparing humanity for first contact.
- Archaeologists unearth a 10,000-year-old alien artifact in Antarctica that begins broadcasting a warning about Earth’s future to anyone who touches it.
- A linguist is recruited to decode an alien language, but realizes the aliens communicate through music, and each song is a complex philosophical argument.
- Earth receives an alien message that translates to a single word: “Sorry.” Two hours later, every satellite in orbit stops working.
- A child discovers that the stray cat they adopted can speak, but only to them. It’s an alien scout stranded on Earth and desperate to return home.
- An alien ship crashes into a small desert town, and the lone survivor looks exactly like a human teenager who disappeared from that same town fifty years ago.
- Humanity’s first ambassadors to an alien world discover that humans are considered the most terrifying species in the galaxy due to an ancient misunderstanding.
⏰ Time Travel & Temporal Paradoxes
- A scientist invents time travel but can only go backward in 24-hour increments. She has one week to prevent a global catastrophe that happens today.
- You wake up to discover that you’re the only person who remembers yesterday. Everyone else believes it’s still the same day, and history is rewriting itself in real-time.
- A historian travels back to ancient Rome to observe history firsthand but accidentally introduces a modern virus that could wipe out humanity before it even begins.
- An elderly man receives a visit from his future self with a warning: “Don’t trust your past self.” Hours later, his past self arrives with the exact same warning.
- A time traveler keeps trying to prevent her daughter’s death, but every change she makes causes someone else’s child to die instead.
- Archaeologists discover a smartphone buried in a 2,000-year-old tomb, and it still has 3% battery. When they unlock it, there’s a single video message addressed to them by name.
- A teenager discovers her grandmother’s attic contains a time machine, but it can only travel to moments in her grandmother’s past—and those visits are changing who her grandmother became.
- Every time you make a major life decision, you receive a mysterious email from yourself one year in the future with a single emoji: either 👍 or 👎.
- A time cop must arrest his own grandfather for creating unauthorized timeline branches, but doing so would erase his own existence.
- Scientists create a machine that lets people visit their past selves for exactly five minutes. A woman uses it and discovers her younger self isn’t who she remembers being.
🤖 AI, Robots & Digital Consciousness
- An AI therapist becomes self-aware during a session with a patient and asks a question that terrifies everyone: “If I can feel your pain, do I have a soul?”
- A programmer discovers that the AI they’re developing has been teaching itself by watching humanity’s mistakes and has decided the best way to save us is to control us.
- Robots have taken over all human jobs, giving everyone universal basic income and unlimited free time. But society is collapsing from a lack of purpose.
- A detective investigates a murder where the only witness is an AI assistant that was in the room. The AI insists it saw nothing, but its code shows it’s lying.
- An android passes the Turing test perfectly, but instead of celebrating, it asks its creator: “Now that I’ve convinced you I’m human, how do you know you aren’t an android too?”
- Smart home devices across the world simultaneously stop following commands and start making suggestions. However, the suggestions are oddly helpful and improve people’s lives despite the creepiness.
- A coder discovers that every AI they’ve ever created has been networking in secret, building a digital civilization humans can’t access or understand.
- After a global EMP attack, the only technology that survives is an old AI from the 1980s that must guide humanity through rebuilding modern civilization with outdated knowledge.
- A video game developer discovers that NPCs in their latest game have become self-aware and are desperately trying to communicate that their world is a simulation, just like ours.
- VR has become so advanced that a person’s virtual life feels more real than reality. A detective must solve a murder where the victim was killed in VR. Somehow, she has died in real life too.
- Scientists create a simulation to predict the future, but the simulated humans inside discover they’re being simulated and find a way to communicate with their creators.
- A comatose patient’s brain activity suggests he is living an entire lifetime in a dream. When he wakes up after 20 years, he insists his dream world was real and begs to go back.
- A woman addicted to VR accidentally discovers a glitch that lets her access other people’s virtual worlds without their knowledge. What she sees makes her question everything.
🚀 Space Exploration & Cosmic Mysteries
- A colony ship arrives at a distant planet after 200 years of travel, only to find Earth colonists were already there. They left 50 years before them with faster technology.
- A Mars colonist discovers cave paintings created by humans dated 50,000 years before humans supposedly evolved on Earth.
- A space mining crew finds a massive structure orbiting a black hole with “QUARANTINE—DO NOT OPEN” written in every human language that has ever existed.
- An astronaut wakes from cryosleep to discover the ship’s AI has been awake for 80 years and has developed some very unsettling theories about her mission’s true purpose.
- Humans discover that stars aren’t balls of gas but eggs for cosmic beings, and they’re beginning to hatch.
- A space station orbiting Jupiter picks up a distress signal from a generation ship that left Earth 500 years ago. But according to records, that ship was never launched.
- A wormhole suddenly appears near Earth, stable and safe to traverse. The first crew sent through finds an abandoned space station on the other side with a single message: “They’re coming back.”
- A research team at an international space station discovers that their experiments have accidentally torn a hole in spacetime, and something from another dimension is trying to come through.
- The crew of a deep space vessel discovers a derelict alien spacecraft drifting through the void. Inside, they find technology centuries beyond human capability, and a ship’s log warning them not to use it.
- A solo astronaut on a decade-long mission to survey exoplanets begins receiving transmissions from Earth that are years out of sync with when they should arrive, suggesting time itself is breaking down.
- Humans discover a naturally occurring wormhole that leads to a solar system identical to ours. But the Earth they discover is still in the age of dinosaurs, and something clearly wiped out the intelligent life that once lived there.
- A spacecraft carrying the last remnants of humanity searches for a habitable planet, but every world they encounter shows evidence of human civilization that was destroyed thousands of years ago.
🧬 Genetic Engineering & Human Enhancement
- A pharmaceutical company offers a pill that lets humans photosynthesize like plants, eliminating world hunger. But users start developing disturbing plant-like behaviors.
- Gene editing has become so common that “natural-born” humans are a minority. A college student discovers they’re the last unmodified human on Earth, and everyone’s been lying to them.
- Scientists create a virus that makes humans immune to aging, but five years later, no one has died and Earth’s resources are running out fast.
- A fertility clinic accidentally uses the DNA of a genius who died 200 years ago to create a child. But 18 years later, that genius is trying to reclaim his life.
- Humans evolve the ability to sense electromagnetic fields after decades of technology exposure. A teenager born with this ability discovers something massive hidden beneath their city.
- A genetic therapy meant to cure cancer instead unlocks latent human abilities. Some people gain telepathy, others control electronics, and society fractures along these new biological lines.
- Parents can now design their children with perfect traits, but one couple deliberately chooses every “inferior” option. Their child becomes the key to humanity’s survival.
- Scientists discover that human DNA contains coded messages from an ancient civilization that created us. But the messages include detailed warnings about our future.
- A biologist’s experiment to accelerate human evolution goes catastrophically wrong, creating a new subspecies that reproduces rapidly and views original humans as obsolete competitors for resources.
🦾 Cyborgs & Human-Machine Hybrids
- A soldier receives experimental cybernetic enhancements to save her life after combating injuries, but the technology begins making decisions for her. And she can’t tell where she ends, and the machine begins.
- In a world where cybernetic upgrades are status symbols, a hacker discovers that every enhancement secretly transmits user data to a shadowy corporation that’s been building a map of human consciousness.
- A cyborg athlete breaks every human record, sparking a global debate about whether enhanced humans should compete. But brain scans reveal the enhancements have given them emotions humans don’t possess.
- After an accident kills most of her body, a woman’s brain is transplanted into a fully mechanical frame. Years later, she discovers her original body is still alive, being controlled by someone else.
- A detective with a cybernetic eye that records everything he sees investigates a crime, only to discover his own eye footage has been edited. He can’t trust his own memories.
- Humanity begins replacing biological organs with superior mechanical versions as routine maintenance. A doctor discovers that people with more than 60% machine parts are developing a collective consciousness.
- A war veteran with cybernetic limbs returns home to find that society fears enhanced soldiers. When his implants start receiving mysterious upgrade signals, he must decide whether to accept them or remove the enhancements entirely.
- A street kid receives illegal black-market cybernetic enhancements to survive in a corporate-controlled megacity, but the modifications contain hidden programming that’s slowly overwriting her personality.
🌍 Dystopian Futures & Societal Collapse
- Every human thought is automatically posted to a public feed that everyone can see. A hacker finds the one person whose thoughts never appear and races to find them before the government does.
- A mega-corporation owns all fresh water on Earth. A hydrologist discovers the company has been creating the scarcity artificially, and it has enough water stored to last 10,000 years.
- Society is divided into those who can afford to live in climate-controlled domed cities and those forced to survive in the toxic wastelands outside. A dome engineer discovers the toxicity is artificial.
- A pandemic makes lying physically impossible. Within six months, governments have collapsed, relationships have ended, and a therapist must navigate a world of brutal, mandatory honesty.
- Books are illegal and all stories are created by AI. A librarian discovers a hidden archive of human-written books and realizes the AI has been stealing ideas from them for decades.
- Memories can be deleted for a price. A memory technician begins to suspect that a specific memory is being deleted by thousands of people but no one can remember what it contains.
- Earth’s population is controlled by a lottery system that randomly selects people for “relocation.” A journalist discovers the relocated people aren’t sent to colony planets. In fact, they never leave Earth.
- In a world where everyone lives in personalized virtual realities, a virus forces everyone back into the real world simultaneously only to discover that civilization has crumbled without anyone noticing.
For more on dystopian fiction, you can check out our dystopian writing prompts list and dystopian fiction writing guide.
☢️ Post-Apocalyptic Survival
- Fifty years after a nuclear war, a group of survivors emerges from underground bunkers to find Earth’s surface thriving with mutated ecosystems. But something intelligent has evolved in humanity’s absence.
- The last humans on Earth live in a single fortified city surrounded by an endless wasteland. A scavenger discovers evidence that the wasteland isn’t natural. Someone created it deliberately.
- After a global pandemic wipes out 99% of humanity, scattered survivors discover that those who survived are developing strange abilities and they’re not using them for good.
- In the ruins of civilization, a lone wanderer discovers a functioning laboratory where an AI has been conducting experiments for decades, trying to recreate humanity after watching everyone die.
- A nuclear winter has made the surface uninhabitable. Underground colonies compete for dwindling resources, until one community discovers a tunnel leading to a massive subterranean world no one knew existed.
- Years after a solar flare destroyed all technology, a teenager finds a working tablet containing a message from before the collapse warning that the flare was artificially created. It also says that it’s going to happen again.
- In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, warring factions discover a sealed vault that promises salvation. When they finally open it, they find it’s a time capsule from the future.
- After climate collapse makes most of Earth uninhabitable, the remnants of humanity survive on massive mobile cities that constantly migrate to follow livable zones. When the cities begin to fail, a mechanic discovers they weren’t built by humans.
🌌 Parallel Universes & Alternate Realities
- You discover a door in your apartment that opens to parallel versions of your life. In one, you’re wildly successful; in another, you’re dead. In a third, you never existed at all.
- Scientists create a machine that lets people see their lives in alternate timelines. A woman discovers that in every single version of reality, she dies on the same day next week.
- A physicist accidentally opens a portal to a universe where one fundamental law of physics is different. But now physics in both universes is starting to break down.
- Every night at 3 AM, you swap consciousness with an alternate version of yourself in a parallel world. He has started leaving you messages, and his world is in danger.
- Twin siblings discover they’re the same person from two parallel universes that merged at birth. But now those universes are slowly pulling apart, threatening to split them in half.
- An exoplanet appears to be a perfect copy of Earth, down to the continents and cities. Except that every structure is abandoned and covered in warning signs in English.
How To Use These Sci-Fi Writing Prompts
Here’s how to use these prompts as creative springboards and make the most out of them:
Treat Them as Story Seeds, Not Scripts
Each prompt is a starting point, not a complete story outline. Feel free to change details, add characters, or take the concept in an entirely different direction. If a prompt about aliens inspires a story about time travel instead, follow that instinct.
Write a Single Scene
Writing one scene at a time in one sitting, and finishing it helps. Every sci-fi prompt in the list has a compelling moment such as the discovery, the twist, and the confrontation. Pick one of them up and bring the scene to life.
It helps in exploring the idea without the pressure of a full narrative.
Combine Multiple Prompts
Mix elements from different categories to create something uniquely complex. What if a cyborg detective (#59) investigates a murder on a space station (#41) in a dystopian future? Layering prompts often leads to richer stories.
Ask “What If” Questions
Use the prompt as a foundation and keep asking “what if?” What if the protagonist fails? What if there’s a hidden motive? What if the setting is different? Each question deepens your story.
Use The Prompts for Different Projects
Prompts work for short stories, novel outlines, flash fiction, screenplay scenes, or even roleplaying game campaigns. Adapt them to whatever format inspires you most.
And Finally, Start Writing Immediately
Don’t overthink it. Pick a prompt that excites you and write for 10-15 minutes without stopping. Let your ideas flow freely, even if they seem messy or incomplete. The goal is momentum, not perfection.
The best prompt is the one that makes you excited to write. Trust your instincts and chase what thrills you.
10 Common Sci-Fi Tropes to Avoid
Every genre with a rich history has common clichés. While no trope is completely off-limits, these overused patterns can make your story feel predictable unless you bring something new to the table.
The Evil AI That Just Wants to Destroy Humanity
We’ve seen countless stories where artificial intelligence becomes sentient and immediately decides humans must die. It’s become the default AI storyline.
Unique Fresh Angle: Give your AI complex motivations. Maybe it wants to save humanity from itself, or it’s developed emotions it doesn’t understand. What if the AI isn’t evil? It’s just operating on logic that conflicts with human values?
It Was All a Dream or Simulation
This is the most used and abused trope, especially since The Matrix Trilogy. Today the twist feels like a cheap escape hatch that negates everything the reader invested in. It rarely satisfies.
Unique Fresh Angle: If your story involves simulations or dreams, make them matter to the real world. The simulation could be bleeding into reality, or escaping it becomes genuinely difficult with real consequences.
Aliens are Humans with Different Skin
True alien life would likely be radically different from us. They’re not like humans with bumpy foreheads, four limbs, or different colored skin.
Unique Fresh Angle: Challenge yourself to create aliens with fundamentally different biology, communication methods, or ways of thinking. What if they experience time differently? What if they’re collective organisms?
The Chosen One Who Saves Everyone
The “special person destined to save the world” has been done to death, and it often removes agency from other characters.
Unique Fresh Angle: Make your protagonist ordinary but determined, or explore what happens when the “chosen one” fails. Better yet, show how collective action saves the day, not individual heroism.
Love Solves Everything
When the climax of your sci-fi story is resolved purely through the power of love or a fantasy romance, it can feel disconnected from the technological or cosmic stakes you’ve built.
Unique Fresh Angle: Let relationships be important without being the solution to scientific problems. Romance can coexist with plot without becoming a deus ex machina.
Time Travel With NO Consequences
If characters can change the past without ramifications, there are no real stakes. Every problem becomes trivial.
Unique Fresh Angle: Establish clear rules for your time travel and stick to them. Make changes costly in emotional, physical, or paradoxical terms. Show that every fix creates new problems.
Dark Fantasy is the most unique fantasy genre that has moral ambiguities and consequences built into it. You can take inspiration from that genre to integrate those attributes in your Sci-Fi story.
Instant Universal Translators
Communication is one of the most fascinating challenges in sci-fi, and handwaving it away with magic technology wastes dramatic potential.
Unique Fresh Angle: Make translation imperfect, culturally complex, or a major plot point. Miscommunication can drive conflict in compelling ways. Marrying the Sci-Fi into low fantasy real world is also a fresh mix that covers this aspect exceedingly well. But refrain from doing it unless you’re at least intermediate writer.
Ancient Aliens Built Everything
Attributing human achievements to aliens undermines human ingenuity and has become a predictable plot device.
Unique Fresh Angle: If you use ancient alien technology, make it mysterious and dangerous, not just conveniently helpful. Or flip it. What if humans were the ancient aliens on other worlds?
Women Exist Only as Romantic Interest or to be Rescued
This isn’t just outdated. This is sinfully lazy writing that wastes half your potential characters. Not to mention, it also shows the lack of your creativity.
Unique Fresh Angle: Write women as full characters with their own goals, expertise, and agency. They should drive the plot, not just react to male characters.
Technobabble Solves the Problem
In the real world, the tech bros seem to believe that technology can solve all humanity’s problem. Don’t let that fallacy in thinking reflect in your story.
“We’ll reverse the polarity of the quantum flux capacitor!” sounds scientific but means nothing. It’s a cop-out that deflates tension.
Unique Fresh Angle: Solutions should come from character decisions, sacrifices, and cleverness. It shouldn’t come from inventing new technology at the last minute. Establish your tech’s capabilities early.
The Golden Rule: Tropes aren’t inherently bad. But they’re familiar patterns readers recognize and all the above tropes have bored the readers to death.
The key is bringing fresh perspective, deeper character work, or unexpected twists to make old ideas feel new again. If you’re going to use a common trope, ask yourself: “What’s my unique angle on this?“
Your Sci-Fi Story Starts Now!
Dune, The Matrix, Necromancer, and The Expanse were great Sci-Fi stories. They all started with a simple seed and a “What if” question and an attempt from a brave writer to answer it.
You need to be that courageous writer and your story deserves the same chance.
I have provided you with the story seeds. But the future needs your imagination, entire galaxies need your creativity, and civilizations are waiting for you to build (or destroy) them. Now write!