Science fiction is arguably the most exciting of all genres. It’s so much more than spaceships and evil robots (though they’re cool too). Science fiction is the far reaches of possibility. It’s what people might be capable of. It’s what the world might face under certain conditions. Science fiction is the greatest game of “what if?” a writer has to play with.

So much of sci-fi written from the past has come to be in our present reality, even if that’s only in a thematic or metaphorical sense. The science fiction genre is one of the greatest tools we have to examine the current state of the human condition and offer predictions, sometimes warnings, for the future. And yes, sometimes sci-fi is also just great fun!

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• An alien is abducted by humans.

• On a distant planet, aliens discover they can tune in and watch human lives on their TV sets. 

• A group of primary school students time travel back to the Dark Ages and find themselves in a shipping town. 

• Terrorists hijack the Internet and render the entire technology useless. 

• A woman finds a portal in the back of her refrigerator. The world she enters at first seems exactly like the life she’s just stepped out of. Except better. 

• A computer developed to be sentient begins to create its own powers. 

• A video game designer discovers a way to make a psychic link to gamers as they play. 

• “Now that Mars has been completely colonized, we can look back on the most important lesson we’ve all learned. ”

• A little girl is given a large balloon for her birthday. 

• You have all of your memories, but no one else remembers your life. 

• A man can see a few minutes into the future but cannot act on what he knows. 

• A woman feels the pull of a strange magnetic force every time she looks toward a particular mountain on the horizon. 

• A biological weapon develops sentience. 

• Two high-school friends successfully perform alchemy in the science lab after class. 

• A man discovers all of the insects in his home are actually mechanical. 

• Plants start growing out of your skin. Besides that, you feel fine. 

• A baby, barely able to sit on her own, takes up a tablet and starts coding a new computer program. 

• An exploration fleet is lost in the far reaches of the universe and then wakes up in s Earth. 

• A man takes a wrong turn driving to a mountain cabin and finds a secret research center. 

• You start having memories of events before the events occur. 

• Emotions can be used as an energy source. 

• An alien terrorizes a medieval village. 

• A local historian of a small village discovers a terrifying truth about the town’s founders. 

• The moon breaks orbit. 

• An alien mind infiltrates the Internet like a computer virus. 

• Computer programs are granted citizenship and human rights. 

• “I know it’s human, but we need to deactivate it. ”

• A man working in his garden suddenly starts to believe he’s a reptile. 

• A woman runs through a small town she’s visiting on business. A man with a dog is watching her. 

• A person with artificial body enhancements starts to get very sick. 

• A family wakes up after being cryogenically frozen for  Earth years. 

• The Olympic committee opens the games to interplanetary competition. 

• You’ve been sick for months for no reason anyone can see. One day you cough up something that gives you the answer. 

• A woman hosting a dinner party realizes she’s accidentally fed her guests poison. 

• You’re at the zoo watching the elephants. A baby elephant wanders close to the edge of the pen, looks at you and says, “Help me. ”

• Earth is a space vessel. 

• A tourist bus stops at a ghost town. There’s a strange humming sound. 

• You discover you have amphibian DNA, but there are no outward signs. 

• A lonely mechanic living on an isolated planet falls in love with a visitor from a nearby moon, even though he knows it’s the wrong thing to do. 

• “One day you’ll see that all this research, it’s just hurting you. ”

• During an intergalactic war, two pilots from opposing sides become close friends after they discover a secret about their leaders. 

• You wake up in a hospital in the middle of a life you know nothing about. 

• A physicist discovers a portal to the afterlife. 

• God turns out to be a powerful CEO on a distant planet. Earth was an experiment and humans an unplanned side effect. 

• A woman burns herself making her morning coffee and makes a startling discovery. 

• A space traveler returns to Earth to spend just one weekend with the son he’s not yet met and is devastated to learn the boy wants to be a pilot. 

• A large crystal is stolen from a secret laboratory. The thieves only know a small amount of what it’s capable of. 

• A man who has never had a creative thought in his life wakes up one day and finds he’s a world-famous artist. 

• “That’s really the only downside of time travel. ”

• Devices that record dreams are widely available and now quite cheap. 

• Scientists discover evidence that Earth as we know it is humankind’s third attempt. 

• A childless couple gets a visitor who claims to be their son sent from the future. 

• You discover that an ingredient common to most food products is actually a form of mind control. 

• A man finds a way to communicate with his other selves in alternate timelines. 

• Patterns in your child’s finger painting unlock a dimensional portal. 

• A new plastic is developed that has the unexpected ability to record thoughts. 

• A time traveler visits a Dark Ages realm and discovers the wizard ruling the land is in truth a master time traveler who is using modern technology to impress and control his people. 

• “Just pass me the phone. You have no idea of the power you’re about to unlock. ”

• Tinnitus is a radio signal from another galaxy. 

• Caffeine is a controlling substance planted by alien spies. 

• You wake up in a completely white room with no doors. There’s a chair and a table. You’re dressed entirely in white. You have no idea where you are or how you got there. 

• An entire town is cryogenically frozen in order to be transported through time. 

• A time traveler realizes she/he has just arrived in the Garden of Eden. 

• A company starts selling a product that lets couples secretly reprogram one another. 

• The entire world loses electricity for a month. 

• You discover another dimension in your pocket. 

• An army is slowly taking over a distant planet in the name of peaceful geological exploration. 

• Leaders of a new planet are shocked to learn the truth of why their colony was founded in the first place. 

• Animals the world over start to respond to a strange sound that humans can hear but are unaffected by. 

• A small-time criminal stumbles upon a huge crime taking place that has intergalactic consequences. 

• “If you want to be able to identify them on sight, here’s the one thing you need to know. Trust me, this could save your life. ”

• “Daddy? Why is my skin like this when everyone else is different?”

• You arrive on a planet recently devastated by a natural disaster. You see your own body lying in the rubble. 

• An alien abduction goes awry when the abducted human is a psychotic killer. 

• A celebrity gets caught up in a sex scandal they have nothing to do with. 

• “Oh, this is more than just medicine. This drug will ensure you’re never unhappy, ever again. ”

• Humans in the future are assigned a digital presence that acts as their protector for all of their life.

• You’re in the lounge room all alone. It’s quiet. You see something move out of the corner of your eye and then suddenly your computer shuts down. 

• “I know it doesn’t seem like much, but this is exactly as I dreamed the Apocalypse would start. ”

• Aliens hijack all of the world’s Ferris wheels as broadcasting towers. 

• Emotions can be downloaded. 

• It’s a New Year’s Eve party. You go to the bathroom just before midnight. When you come out everyone is celebrating the New Year, but it’s twenty years past the date the night started in. 

• Your future self appears and explains in earnest how you have to fix the sun before it’s too late. 

• “A fear of clowns is just so cliché!”

• Your word processing program starts writing by itself. You publish the novel it writes and make a lot of money. 

• A world-famous biologist is visited by an alien who delivers some news that will undermine his entire life’s work. 

• You wake up in the middle of falling from a great height, not knowing how you got there. 

• A working-class soldier is part of a team constructing a huge machine. None of the crew knows what it is, just the parts they’re assigned to. He learns a startling truth about the machine’s purpose. 

• A young boy finds the control for his new remote control toy car has other abilities. 

• Looking through your great-grandmother’s recipe box, you find a scientific equation scribbled on a scrap of paper. Two days later, soldiers turn up demanding the equation. 

• A chef is given the task of developing new foodstuffs for the next off-world colony. 

• In a distant colony, the women decide to eradicate men from their world save a select few held captive for breeding. 

• You accidentally discover a way to fuel cars using thoughts. 

• A group of teenagers wakes up in a room. They don’t know how they got there. There are five doors. 

• “Oh no! I’m so telling Mum what you did!”

• A scientist claims to have developed a method to remove the “war center” from the human brain. 

• A particular order of dance steps opens a portal into a different galaxy. 

• A corporation buys a planet in order to harvest the plant life that grows there, which has a unique medical property. 

• Colonists discover their entire existence is a cruel practical joke. 

• Aliens arrive on earth and are welcomed into human society. Flash forward a few generations and the aliens have become the lowest of the low class. 

• The government employs insects to assist them in controlling the minds of the military.