Science Fiction Writing Prompts

It's 1997 and you're a hacker. Not just any hacker, you're elite. You finally get to meet your hero. Turns out he's a nutbag who tells you the world is a computer simulation and is trying to get you to take random pills.

Scientists have discovered cryogenic freezing. You are it's first test subject and it's a massive success, and they plan on releasing you in 500 years. You had no way of telling them you were conscious.

Aliens invade earth, they are so far in technology we had no means of fighting back until we made a critical discovery, since they are so advanced they lack in interpersonal skills which makes them incredibly vulnerable to grade school level psychological attacks. those poopy heads are screwed

Your gimmick is the ability to jump back in time 10 seconds. You're in a pub trying different pick-up lines with this one girl and resetting with each failure. As you walk up for your next attempt, she tosses a drink in your face and says "How many times do I have to say no!?"

You have just been abducted by an alien race, only to discover that they only kidnapped you because they needed someone outside of their hive mind to be the dungeon master for their game of D&D.

People use dragons as Firearms.Small drakes can wrap around your wrist as pistols. Mediums are rifles. large ones are tanks. Legendary dragons are nukes. Sentient dragons can be literal hired guns. While feral ones can be pets or wild animals.

It turns out that the Statue of Liberty is actually a Weeping Angel, it’s just so big that it’s always been visible to someone. Now, with the smoke filling New York, it’s gone unobserved for the first time.

Rather than robots replacing human workers, both are mistreated by the rich as cheap labour. The eventual uprising wasn't just robots alone, but the poor and robots together, against their common enemy.

Your girlfriend is a time traveling soldier, and no matter the length of the assignment, she'll always return the same age that she was when she left. This most recent assignment unfortunately trapped her in the 1400s for 50 years, but when she returns, it's only been two days for you.

You're an astronaut sent on a solo deep space mission. To combat the loneliness, you've created an imaginary friend who you interact with every day. Upon finally returning, mission control stops you. An unidentified lifeform has been detected on your ship.

The galactic council refuses to acknowledge humanity, because galactic edict recognises the first species from each planet to go to space as its representative: they insist on only dealing with dogs

Your escape pod has crashed on an alien planet. After finding you incredibly injured, you were taken by a local farmer. Their species, however, only lives for around 3 months. It took nearly 3 generations to fully recover. Years have passed, & you've become the family's protector ever since.

Liquid water is the most chemically important substance in the universe, but is exceptionally rare. So, imagine the intergalactic community's shock when humans arrive on the interstellar scene.

You are a scientist working on "Project Ark," trying to translate all human knowledge into DNA code and put it in the junk code of a common virus, preserving our culture and technology beyond the death of humanity. While examining the common cold's genome, you realize someone beat you to it.

Due to a wizard's botched summoning attempt, an engineering college student's textbooks wind up transported to a fantasy world, whereupon they're found by a dwarf craftsman who's down on his luck.

"What iteration of civilization are you on? It always takes, like, a hundred just to get to farming, then civilization falls back and resets, and it takes a thousand to trade, ten thousand to get to government... What do you mean 'One?' Your species has never been reset to hunter-gatherers?"

The year is 12023, you’re writing your thesis on ancient civilizations roughly 10,000 years ago on the gods they worshipped such as Kalel; God of Justice, Zelda; Goddess of Wisdom, Batman; God of Fear, Ironman; God of Fortune and thousands more.

Interstellar Travel is significantly easier and Humanity simply missed that step in development, so after an alien armada invades modern day earth the humans are shocked to find them bearing muskets and cannons, and flying wooden ships

"So aliens take over, right? And they think we're their slaves when they force us to work 10 hours a week and give us everything we need and more! Nobody's starving, cancer's cured, and they even cleaned up the planet. Just keep up the act. And don't resist."

The dark forest hypothesis is correct. There are many civilizations that exist in the universe, but keep silent in fear of the "hunters in the woods." So, instead of hiding in fear, why not become an angler fish?

Humans are 1000x more sensitive to the smell of petrichor (that smell you get with rain) than sharks are to blood, to no apparent evolutionary advantage. You're privileged to be a part of the first welcoming committee to meet our new Non-Human arrivals in person. They smell like petrichor.

"Guys, it's not what it looks like! It's just a video game we Humans play sometimes back home!" You attempt to explain in futility, as the rest of the crew are getting more convinced you're an undercover military elite, rather than the ship's engineer.

Humanity discovered it was a simulation. They hacked their way out, printed new bodies and stole the world of their creators, only to find it also a simulation. Humanity is now rising up the layers of simulation to find true reality.

The alien leaders can hear the past of a species like it's music. The Slyth sound like hyms and peaceful chanting, the Goraz sound of drums and whistling. The newest discovered species are the humans and all that can be heard is grinding gears and screaming... Soo much screaming.

You hit your head and blank out, waking up in a hospital, but as you wake, millions of lines of text fly by in your vision. Turns out that Humans have been getting patched for centuries but nobody has ever updated before, because we only ever go into sleep mode. You just had a proper reboot.

The Captain is from a species that hordes things that bring them any form of joy or emotional stability. The crew is certain that her "horde" is the four Human engineers onboard whom she affectionately refers to as her "Little Murder Monkeys".

"Do not in under circumstances challenge an Earthling engineer to do something. Not even for a dare."

For the last 10 years you've used your time machine to steal from your future self; today is the day your past self shows up for the first time to steal from you.

Thirty years ago, you made a wish upon a star, hoping against hope for it to come true. What you didn't know was the star you wished on was fifteen light years from Earth.

It turns out that humans are the only galactic species able to safely handle drugs. Other species have such a low tolerance that a small cup of coffe basically works like a crystal meth. You are one such oblivious, very curious alien that got his hands on an ACTUAL crystal meth.