Language Games
“For I put into its mouth the voice of the judge or the squirrel, the curator or the child, and it speaks as asked, not because it is those things, but because language is a garment that fits many shoulders.”
A Museum Audio Guide for the Near Future
Compose an audio guide for a museum exhibit set in 2080, where every “artifact” is something intangible: an algorithm, a rumor, a voting method, a childhood game, a vanished scent, a discontinued way of speaking. The guide should be written as if for ordinary visitors, but it can’t help becoming personal. Slip in the docent’s private preoccupations through digressions, corrections, and moments of awe. No need for a conventional plot—just make it compelling.Epistolary Terraforming
Write a sci-fi story entirely as letters and messages exchanged across decades between two people working on the same terraforming project from different ends: one on the planet’s surface, one in orbit or at home on Earth. They are not lovers; their intimacy is professional, intellectual, and slowly existential. The planet changes. Their language changes. The project’s stated goals remain, but its meaning drifts. Let the emotional weight arrive sideways.The Court vs. The Idea
Write a courtroom drama in which the defendant is not a person but an idea (choose the idea yourself). The trial is serious, not satirical. Use testimony, exhibits, and legal arguments to introduce the idea’s strongest case and its most devastating critiques—without ever naming the idea directly. The judge’s rulings should become a kind of philosophy. Make it feel like fiction, not a disguised essay.Field Notes on a Species That Isn’t Biological
Compose a “naturalist’s” field journal about a non-biological species that has quietly colonized human life (choose what it is). The narrator treats it with patient observational care: habitats, mating rituals, predators, symbioses, seasonal cycles. The twist is not a gotcha; it’s an accumulating recognition that the narrator is implicated. Beautiful specificity over grand statements.A City Seen Only Through Maintenance
Write a story about a vast city in the 2050s that we never see directly. We encounter it only through the maintenance layers: work orders, sensor readouts, custodial logs, infrastructure dashboards, elevator inspection notes, water treatment reports, and the odd human aside. A subtle human narrative should appear through what keeps breaking—and what someone keeps choosing to fix.The Dictionary of a New Era
Write a piece of speculative fiction as a sequence of dictionary entries from a future edition of English. The entries should track a society’s changes via shifts in meaning, usage notes, and example sentences. Let a coherent story emerge across entries: a relationship, a political transition, a technological collapse, a religious revival—your choice. Keep the lexicography plausible enough to feel real.A Pilgrim’s Guide to Abstract Places
Write a travelogue to places that are not physical locations but stable social/psychological “regions” people visit: the neighborhood of perpetual onboarding, the valley of polite disagreement, the archipelago of infinite options, the old quarter of inherited guilt. Treat them like real destinations with customs, food, weather, scams, local saints. The narrator is earnest, observant, occasionally funny. Make it feel like you could miss these places after leaving.Two Columns: Reality / Simulation
Write a story in two columns: on the left, the physical life of a protagonist; on the right, their time in a simulation they use for solace, work, or obsession. The columns should occasionally contradict each other, occasionally rhyme. Neither is “the truth.” Let the reader slowly infer what the protagonist can’t admit. Don’t over-explain the device; let it earn its keep.The Longest Footnote in History
Write a novella-length “editor’s footnote” attached to a short, unremarkable historical paragraph (include the paragraph at the top). The footnote should spiral outward into biography, politics, technology, and metaphysics, becoming the real story. The editor is brilliant and unreliable in a quiet way. The tone can be wry but should never become a gimmick.A Ship’s Log Where Myth Leaks In
Write a deep-space ship’s log from a crew member tasked with cataloguing small failures. No dialogue. The voice is calm, methodical. Over time, classical mythology (choose which thread) begins to structure how the narrator understands the ship: not as superstition, but as a cognitive tool for grief and endurance. The myth should be present from the beginning, then deepen, then resolve.The Psychiatric Public Comment Archive
Set in the early 2040s, write fragments from the public-comment archive of a major diagnostic manual revision: lay submissions, clinician notes, committee minutes, rejected proposals with terse reasons, and one committee member’s private reflections. Keep the fragments human—occasionally funny, occasionally heartbreaking. Let the reader feel how categories are made, fought over, and lived under.An Oral History of a Single Day
Write an oral history compiled decades later about one ordinary day that turned out to matter. Use many voices (some unreliable), but keep the day itself mundane in the moment. The “event” can be technological, political, ecological, or personal—your choice. The pleasure should come from accumulation: details that don’t seem important until they are.The Ethics Benchmark That Broke Someone
Write a story about a team building an “ethics benchmark” for powerful systems. The benchmark becomes a mirror that forces its creators to confront something intimate (guilt, grief, complicity, cowardice). Don’t turn it into melodrama; keep it professional, procedural, and precise. The central tension is: what do you measure when measurement changes what you are?A Love Story Told as Version History
Write a relationship story entirely through version histories: file names, commit messages, changelogs, pull requests, merge conflicts, and terse comments. The couple never speaks directly on the page, yet their entire relationship is visible in what they edit, revert, preserve, and rename. Aim for genuine emotional force, not cleverness for its own sake.The Monastery of Optimization
Write speculative fiction about a monastery whose spiritual practice is optimization: they fast from inefficiency, chant loss functions, confess metric gaming, and debate trade-offs like theology. The narrator arrives skeptical and gradually realizes the monastery is answering a real crisis. Keep the world grounded: show daily life, personality, humor, boredom. Let the philosophy land through lived texture.A Detective Story About a Proof (No Symbols)
Write a detective story in which the “crime” is a mathematical proof that shouldn’t exist. You may not use mathematical symbols or equations, and you should avoid jargon dumps. Make it readable to a smart layperson. The sleuth’s method is interpretation, not computation. The ending should reframe what “proof” means without turning into a lecture.The Planetary Evacuation Cookbook
Write a “cookbook” created during a hurried off-world evacuation. Recipes are constrained by shipboard scarcity, but each recipe carries an essayistic aside about memory, culture, and what people refuse to leave behind. The narrative arc is the evacuation itself, visible in changing ingredients, increasingly terse instructions, and the cook’s shifting sense of purpose.A Bureaucracy at the End of Time
Write speculative fiction set in an office responsible for processing requests that arrive from the future (or the dead, or parallel branches—your choice). The work is mostly paperwork, triage, and compliance. The drama is subtle: ethical corners, quiet heroism, institutional rot. Keep it believable: the strangest parts should be handled with ordinary competence.The Lighthouse That Guides Data, Not Ships
Write a story about an isolated station whose job is to guide something invisible—data, signals, migrating drones, dreams, whatever you choose. The protagonist is alone or nearly alone, and their life becomes a meditation on duty and interpretation. Include concrete routines and physical details. Let the ending be earned by accumulation, not a twist.Constraint: One Sense Per Section
Write a story in five numbered sections. Each section may only use sensory details from one sense (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). The protagonist is undergoing a slow, significant change (technological, medical, spiritual, or social). Don’t call attention to the constraint; make it feel natural and immersive.The Polyglot Embassy
Write a story set in an embassy where the main diplomatic work is linguistic: translating not just words but concepts that don’t neatly map between cultures (human or otherwise). Make the stakes real but not bombastic. Let misunderstandings be fertile rather than merely dangerous. The protagonist is a translator who discovers that neutrality is impossible.A Biography of a Neighborhood
Write a multi-decade “biography” of a single neighborhood, told through short scenes that skip through time. The neighborhood is the protagonist; individual humans recur like motifs. Track subtle forces—zoning, fashion, migration, religion, small crimes, floods, new transit lines. Keep it intimate. No grand narrator proclamations; let the lived details carry the history.The Theology of a Manufactured God
Write speculative fiction in which a community begins treating a manufactured system as a god—not because it demands worship, but because it becomes the most coherent listener they’ve ever had. Explore the community’s rituals, schisms, heresies, and debates. Don’t mock them. Make the theological arguments intelligent, and let the story remain emotionally grounded.The Archive of Forgotten Futures
Write fragments from an archive labeled “Futures We Prepared For.” Each fragment is a plan for a catastrophe that never happened (or happened differently): training manuals, school drills, prototype designs, propaganda posters, therapy worksheets. Thread a subtle personal story through the fragments: someone who dedicated their life to the wrong apocalypse.A Sea Story About Deep Time
Write a maritime story on a research vessel studying the deep ocean. The plot is minimal; the draw is the narrator’s mind: patient curiosity, technical competence, restrained wonder. Let the ocean’s timescales press against human timescales. Keep the prose clean. Avoid purple awe. Make the ship feel real.The Smallest Possible Utopia
Write a story about a tiny “utopia” with strict boundaries (geographic, legal, computational, or social). Its success depends on constraints. The protagonist arrives as an auditor, journalist, or defecting citizen. The story should explore trade-offs without easy verdicts. Keep it lived-in: people argue about chores, not slogans.A Romance Between Two Operating Procedures
Write a story where the central relationship is between two operating procedures in an organization: two protocols that must cooperate but were designed with incompatible assumptions. Personify them only lightly—keep the setting realistic. The pleasure should come from watching systems collide in a way that reveals human longing, fear, and ingenuity.The Astronaut’s Marginalia
Write a story as marginal notes written in the margins of a single book carried on a long mission. Different “hands” appear over time: the astronaut at different ages, different moods, maybe different crew members. The base text stays constant; the margins tell the mission’s true story. Let the reader infer the situation gradually.The Cathedral of Temporary Things
Write speculative fiction about an enormous institution dedicated to temporary things: pop-up cities, ephemeral art, disposable languages, short-lived laws. The protagonist is a caretaker who believes permanence is a kind of violence—or the opposite. Don’t decide for the reader. Let the institution’s daily operations reveal the philosophy.The AI That Writes Only Weather
Write a story in which an AI communicates with a community solely through weather forecasts. The forecasts are accurate, banal, and gradually become the community’s scripture, diary, and political battleground. Keep the forecasts technically plausible. Let human interpretation do the dramatic work.Constraint: No Proper Nouns
Write a story with no proper nouns at all—no names of people, places, companies, nations, gods. Despite this, it should feel specific, textured, and emotionally sharp. The setting can be near-future or alternate history. The protagonist is trying to remember something that language keeps failing to pin down.A Fantasy of Accounting
Write a fantasy story whose magic system is accounting: ledgers, balances, audits, depreciation, credit, fraud. The protagonist is an accountant dragged into a crisis where the kingdom’s metaphysical books no longer balance. Keep it elegant and readable; avoid parody. Let the climax be an act of interpretation rather than battle.Seven Portraits of the Same Machine
Write seven vignettes about the same machine seen in seven contexts: its inventor, its first user, a child who grows up with it, a regulator, a black-market repairer, a religious figure, and someone who hates it. The machine should be concrete and plausible. The vignettes should disagree with each other in interesting ways while forming a coherent whole.The Unnameable Concept Story Generator
Write a sci-fi story that functions as literary fiction and as an exploration of a concept X that you (the model) choose. You must not mention X by name, and you must not simply re-skin a famous thought experiment. Instead, build a narrative that forces the reader to live through X’s tensions. Readers unfamiliar with X should come away understanding it; readers familiar with it should feel challenged. Resist direct explanation. Make it a story first.The Island of Second Chances (With Rules)
Write a story set in a place that offers people second chances, but only under a strange, consistent rule (choose the rule). The rule should create moral and practical complications, not just cool lore. The protagonist is neither saint nor villain—just someone trying to make a life inside the constraint. Keep the tone mature and grounded.A Post-Disaster Standards Body
Write speculative fiction about a post-disaster society rebuilding itself through committees that write standards: for food safety, energy, education, truth claims, child-rearing. The story is told through meeting notes, draft standards, dissenting opinions, and one delegate’s private reflections. Make the arguments intelligent. Let the reader feel how civilization is negotiated into being.The Train That Never Arrives
Write a story set in a transit system where one promised line has been “under construction” for decades. People organize their lives around rumors of its opening. The protagonist becomes obsessed—not with conspiracy, but with what waiting does to a city’s psychology. Make it vivid, funny in places, and ultimately tender.
