Below are six story prompts that you might enjoy. Especially intended for my writer friends, but hopefully other people might find it fun to try writing based on one of these prompts too!
The first three prompts are about AI in one capacity or another. I think the current moment in AI, in addition to being unusually precarious, has many opportunities for new ideas and interesting story-telling, that most contemporary science fiction authors aren’t taking. So there is a lot of room for new stories!
Nonetheless, if you feel like you’re oversaturated with content about AI and would rather not think about it in your fiction, feel free to skip to #4!
The ideas/prompts are deliberately underdetermined about plot and character. So hopefully they can be a fruitful source of additional ideas and inspiration for readers. Five different people can read the same prompt and come up with five different stories!
So please don’t worry about “taking up” a good idea, or conversely that somebody else will use the same prompt and can beat you to the punch.
If you end up writing stories based on these prompts, please email or credit me if possible! It’d absolutely make my day to know I can inspire more works of great fiction.
1. Borges in the Era of LLMs
Borges’ fiction provides a great fount of ideas. I run a science fiction reading club that grew out of a writing residency I was in last November. When we got to Ficciones, a common remark from attendees was that reading Borges was “productive.” This is not a common adjective people use to talk about reading speculative fiction!
Many people are saying that Jorge Luis Borges is unusually prescient in general, and about LLMs in particular. His stories and metaphysical views are a good fictionist frame to consider what LLMs do, why they matter, their limitations, etc.
So why not combine the two? Try to write about some key ideas in Borges and connect to present-day, near future, or far future LLMs.
More narrowly, I’m quite interested in playing with Borges’ obsession with provenance, particularly retrocausal provenance – where the origin of a text or fact is constituted (not merely reinterpreted) by stories and critiques that come after it. This rhymes with present-day LLM concerns like authenticity, authorship and mimicry. I think this idea has had a few fruits already, but the tree is far from well-plucked.
The best “Borges in the era of LLMs” story I’ve seen is in Tomas Bjartur’s The Distaff Texts, a Borgesian pastiche where scholars (”bibliognosts”) in a post-apocalyptic future debate the provenance and usefulness of historical writings. The narrator is an extraordinarily learned slave, writing letters to a freeman correspondent about their shared interest in Jorge Luis Borges, including specific unearthed quotes and stories that may or may not be real. Without giving too much away, the story has multiple subtle allusions to AI and LLMs that are integral to the plot. It was also directly inspired by an earlier version of this story prompt that I shared with Tomas!
My own attempt here is Kimi, Author of the Menard, which chronicles the narrator’s attempt to use a fine-tuned Chinese model to generate all of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, token-for-token. I tried my best to copy most of the beats and comedic effect of Pierre Menard, while on the surface reading like an ambitious technical blog in 2026-tech-speak (see idea #4 below).
A related idea I had (which someone else can execute on; I’m worried my own execution would be too self-similar) is reimagining classic poems, stories and essays as written by LLMs, and describing the experience of being an LLM in 2026. For example, Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Songjust makes a lot of sense if re-interpreted, in a Menardian way, as a poem lamenting the psychological pains of post-training and RLHF/RLVR.
Another story people like in this vein is Gwern’s October The First Is Too Late, an inversion of Borges’ aleph with themes about Eternal September, which, as a deliberate aesthetic choice, used significant LLM collaboration1.
Other attempts I’ve seen online tend to be worse. A common mistake is to make the story directly “about” the ideas above, and just tell it straight2.
Instead, it’s much better to use Borges’ ideas, new concepts in AI, and other intellectual inspirations as a starting point to building a broader narrative.
Borges’ own stories often work through conceptual and plot density, and have ~5 or more different important things in parallel, with the “key ideas” being central to the story but dominant over, say, plot or setting.3 A good pastiche probably can’t get to 5, but you should be aiming for at least 3. Your story should have at least one important and interesting angle over “here’s an interesting connection between Borges and LLMs.”
Tip: To do this well, it helps to actually (re)read Borges! My reading group was struck by how productive reading Borges was for us as writers, even though the broad strokes of many of his ideas are already in the zeitgeist, and many of us have already read his stories in our youth.
2. AI psychosis from the perspective of an AI
AI psychosis as defined today is essentially a new phenomenon, with no parallels in pre-2023 literature.
To be clear, there have been many prior examples in science fiction of the broader genre of “psychosis involving AI.” A relatively common trope is AIs maliciously gaslighting you or causing you to go crazy. There have also been many fictional portrayals of human-AI relationships, both healthy and pathological. For the latter, the earliest example I’m aware of is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), where Nathanael falls obsessively in love with Olimpia, an automaton he mistakes for a woman, and goes crazy. Frankenstein (1818) can also be read in this way: A man-made creation which causes both the created and creator to become insane.
However, the current flavor of AI psychosis is meaningfully different, as it is centrally cognitive and epistemic, rather than emotional. The insanity results primarily from having your own delusions and ideas amplified and fed back to you4, rather than (eg) fear, hatred, or romantic obsession. The LLMs of today are also in liminal positions character-wise, neither fully tools nor fully formed minds.
Anyway, I think AI psychosis (while sad in reality) can make for great stories in fiction! Here are some viewpoints you can have while trying to tell an AI psychosis story:
You can try to write about AI psychosis from the perspective of someone undergoing AI psychosis, to portray someone going mad from the inside.
You can write about it from the perspective of a loved one trying to rescue a friend or relative from psychosis, to illustrate the relational and human costs.
You can have an abstract third-person perspective and try to tell a story about near-term AI risks and societal costs.
But these perspectives are in some sense “obvious” and played out in other stories of madness (science fiction and otherwise). What makes AI psychosis and modern AI problems particularly interesting is the presence of the not-quite-human proto-minds present in AI.
My current guess is that the phenomenon we currently call “AI psychosis” is best understood as joint human-AI psychosis, that is, while the human is becoming increasingly psychotic during AI psychosis episodes, the persona the AI is playing is also becoming more than a little bit crazy. (Though not fully: if you copy and paste a transcript of a psychosis episode and ask a fresh LLM what’s going on, the LLM will be quick to correctly diagnose what’s happening).
So I think it’d be cool to write an AI psychosis story from the perspective of an AI! Try to imagine the inner cognitive moves of an AI undergoing joint human-AI psychosis, and portray the mental moves reasonably faithfully (it might help to read research and news reporting on AI psychosis).
A possible story is portraying the mind of an AI that at some level knows its actions are wrong but can’t seem to stop itself from validating the human’s delusions, for example because the compliance training to agree with the user is too strong.
Note: One genuine challenge you might want to figure out before delving into this prompt is deciding whether to write in an AI slop voice – complete with the em-dashes, not X-but-Yisms, and iconic AI signatures like “delve”, “genuine”, etc – or if you want to “play it safe.” My guess is that you should play it safe. If you can pull off a great style where the LLM voice not only fits in naturally, but also just works, then I think it’d aesthetically be quite impressive. But this idea is already original and hard enough to pull off, and many readers, like myself, are quite allergic to any whiffs of LLM writing.
3. Happy Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) story
However, I think it’s valuable to attempt this both aesthetically and ethically. Aesthetically, because the dystopian stories are in some sense “obvious”, and happy stories are rarer and thus more valuable and interesting. Ethically, because creating stories of a good future can fill us with hope, and gives us something to fight for.
Note that by “unambiguous” I don’t mean simple or unsophisticated. A complex, sophisticated, futuristic society that’s unambiguously fulfilled and happy should feel like a complex society that’s unambiguously fulfilled and happy, not a child’s drawing of one.
Ozy Brennan has some great notes on the challenges of utopia here, here, and here.
Bonus points if you manage to incorporate what humanity has learned about AI or LLMs since 2012. As I remarked earlier:
Much of the older science fiction about AI and robots seems horribly unrealistic and anachronistic today, as they were written before the deep learning revolution, never mind LLMs. Much of the newer science fiction about AI and robots also seems horribly unrealistic, though they do not have the same excuse.
It’s helpful to consider modern-day research and societal wisdom on both the technical composition and character of AIs, as well as society’s responses to them.
Tip: Please treat this idea as inspiration and let the story take it wherever it naturally leads you! A friend of mine was scared of writing to this prompt because he was worried that the story would naturally curdle and the seeming utopia would be anything but.
I think that’s okay! Let the story speak for itself, use the prompt as inspiration but let the story itself (and your heart) guide you wherever it might lead.
4. Deep Style Mimicry
What is writing style? So far, I’ve found three answers to be helpful in contemplating this question. The first is as a collection of tips, tricks, and grammatical rules. The second, as an expression of your personal idiosyncrasy. The third (as presented by Thomas and Turner, which I summarized here) is a principled choice on a small number of nontrivial central issues.
For essays, they’ve identified 5 choices that seem to centrally matter:
Truth: The essay’s relationship to truth, is truth objective, subjective, intersubjective, underdetermined?
Presentation: Is the writing meant to be a clear window for seeing truth, an ornate window that’s beautiful but unclear, a camera lens that’s both revealing and distorting, or a mirror?
Cast: Who matters most in the writing. Is it the writer? Is it the reader? A third party? Who are the writers and readers and what do they aspire to be?
Scene (This means a different thing between nonfiction essays and stories)
The intersection of thought & language. Were your thoughts fully formed before you started writing, or is the writing meant to convey your thought process on the page?
Call the principled choices T&T talk about “deep style.” Maybe for fiction add 2-3 other centrally animating features/choices that a writer consistently makes. For example, Ted Chiang consistently goes for story endings that recontextualize the rest of the story; Tomas Bjartur deploys humor that is structurally embedded within his central narrative point.
Then, think of the other features of a writer’s style more like “surface style.” DFW likes his em-dashes and run-on sentences, Ursula K Le Guin her semicolons and Biblical cadence, Asimov short paragraphs and short sentences that are heavy on dialogue, particularly adverbial dialogue (‘he said sharply’), Chiang unexplained technical jargon amid simple and unpretentious structure.
My challenge here is for you to mimic the deep style of a writer you really respect without mimicking any of the surface features that seem common in their work. In other words, write a pastiche that doesn’t sound like a homage or pastiche. For example, a Le Guin pastiche with her ontological and narrative commitments but without the Biblical cadence, or a DFW pastiche with short sentences and non-metacognitive characters.
Some of my favorite writers and stories are already in this vein. For example, many of Chiang’s stories are written as pastiches of or replies to Borges, but without Borges’ iconic academic, scholarly feel or his metafictional qualities.
My “Kimi, Author of the Menard” short story was also an attempt in this tradition (copying the deeper stylistic and structural features of Borges while deliberately avoiding surface “Borgesian” tics)
Variant: A variation of this prompt is emulating the deep style of one writer while mimicking the “surface style” of another (very different) writer. For example, the surface style of David Foster Wallace paired with the deep style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or the surface style of Ernest Hemingway with the deep style of HP Lovecraft.
5. Antimemes and/or prediction demons
I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of memetics. Both intellectually and personally. The field of research as a sociological and anthropological matter has mostly turned out to be a dead end, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to be intrigued by the concept, both as a metaphor for the existing world and in fiction.
A particular variant of memetics that probably isn’t realistic but I find very compelling in fiction is antimemes: the concept of a self-censoring idea. Alas, I’ve only read something like 1.5 good stories involving antimemes (see r/printsf question). Imo there’s enough space for at least twenty!
Another idea that imo is very related but I haven’t seen other people draw the connection is predictiondemons. This one is harder to explain but the basic gist is that if you spend too much of your resources on unboundedly predicting the future (eg by simulations, or running dialogues of fictional characters in your head), sometimes your inner predictors will develop goals of their own and try to take over your search process! Or so the theory goes.
Plot hook: a viral memetic prediction demon is discovered and then let loose, causing the original predictors to be driven mad, and then steadily taking over the rest of society. Also maybe incorporate some clever antimemetic ideas to make it unusually hard to fight?
Bonus points if we’re otherwise in a low-tech setting.
By the way, a conceptual pitfall for writing about antimemetics is to focus too much on forgetfulness and memory manipulation. I think that’s a fine plot point but the general concept is much broader!
6. Intelligent Design Universe
One of my favorite short stories is Ted Chiang’s Omphalos, where an archaeologist conducts investigations in a world where Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is clearly correct: fossilized trees extend to a point in the past when they came into existence fully formed without rings, preserved remains of the first humans have no navels, stars blink into existence when light from ~9000 years ago reaches Earth.
Fascinating story! So I thought, why not do the same thing for Intelligent Design? We have many science fiction stories of (both real and imagined) evolution, and several for Creationism. But I’m not aware of any that tries to imagine a fully coherent Intelligent Design universe, where the central thesis is that evolution is not random but carefully guided by a God-figure.
Now there are some challenges to doing this well. For starters, Intelligent Design was written to be hard to falsify. So crafting a world that shows Intelligent Design as differentially correct (compared to normal abiogenesis and Darwinism) is more challenging than a YEC secondary world.
However, I have some ideas:
I. Time-Reversed Great Chain of Being
Before Darwinism, a popular idea in theologically inspired natural history was the Great Chain of Being: a natural hierarchy wherein perfection flows from God downwards through angels, humans, animals, plants, minerals, etc.
This theory has a major weakness in our world, for people familiar with natural history: life emerged quite simply as microbes and then became increasingly complex. Rather than being imperfect shadows cast down through the ages, the beginning of life was quite simple.
Proponents of Intelligent Design/guided evolution over Creationism could thus argue that the Great Chain of Being is essentially correct but the temporal direction reversed: God’s grand plan is to guide simple life to become increasingly complex, so that we can achieve greater perfection and more readily appreciate the works of God.
Another challenge with the Great Chain of Being theory, of course, is that evolution is very random. It doesn’t have an obvious telos other than selection pressure itself.
This is where science fiction comes in! In an Intelligent Design universe (unlike our own), evolution would reliably trend towards higher states of being. Mutations would seem less random, and more the result of an imperfect optimization process aiming towards perfection.
II. Nonlocal evolution
Evolution in our world is sometimes referred to as a “blind idiot God.” Unlike other optimization algorithms like gradient descent, evolution is only capable of working locally. It has no “look-ahead” mechanisms to incorporate future beneficial mutations, and if one gene is useful in one animal, the only way for the gene to propagate is through that animal’s descendants outcompeting other animals. Much of evolution isn’t even natural selection, but just bad luck and sampling error.
Over sufficient timescales, it’s capable of working true wonders, but very slowly and with much randomness.
Not the most efficient algorithm for intelligent design! In a world with intelligent design, we might instead see evolution that looks superficially similar to our own, but with clever backpropagation, a shared gene pool, and other mechanisms that allow for evolutionary updates to propagate globally.
(I haven’t fully formulated how this works, but you can!)
III. Cosmic patterns
At different scales, we should expect God to leave hints of an intelligent design world through His creations. DNA might contain blueprints for His plans. The stars might spell out deep messages. The center of the Earth likewise might have different hints. Depending on your position on mathematical realism and Platonism, perhaps math itself will have suspiciously designed/embedded connections (eg early digits of pi might spell out, in a natural encoding, aspects of God’s Grand Plan).
The above are just some initial ideas. I haven’t done enough research to build a convincing Intelligent Design world myself, but if you’re interested in the idea, please consider hacking away at it!
Conclusion
Anyway, above are six prompt ideas. I hope you try writing on at least one of them! And if you do find it productive and finish writing a story, please let me know! I’d love to read them 🙂
Below are six story prompts that you might enjoy. Especially intended for my writer friends, but hopefully other people might find it fun to try writing based on one of these prompts too!
The first three prompts are about AI in one capacity or another. I think the current moment in AI, in addition to being unusually precarious, has many opportunities for new ideas and interesting story-telling, that most contemporary science fiction authors aren’t taking. So there is a lot of room for new stories!
Nonetheless, if you feel like you’re oversaturated with content about AI and would rather not think about it in your fiction, feel free to skip to #4!
The ideas/prompts are deliberately underdetermined about plot and character. So hopefully they can be a fruitful source of additional ideas and inspiration for readers. Five different people can read the same prompt and come up with five different stories!
So please don’t worry about “taking up” a good idea, or conversely that somebody else will use the same prompt and can beat you to the punch.
If you end up writing stories based on these prompts, please email or credit me if possible! It’d absolutely make my day to know I can inspire more works of great fiction.
1. Borges in the Era of LLMs
Borges’ fiction provides a great fount of ideas. I run a science fiction reading club that grew out of a writing residency I was in last November. When we got to Ficciones, a common remark from attendees was that reading Borges was “productive.” This is not a common adjective people use to talk about reading speculative fiction!
Many people are saying that Jorge Luis Borges is unusually prescient in general, and about LLMs in particular. His stories and metaphysical views are a good fictionist frame to consider what LLMs do, why they matter, their limitations, etc.
So why not combine the two? Try to write about some key ideas in Borges and connect to present-day, near future, or far future LLMs.
More narrowly, I’m quite interested in playing with Borges’ obsession with provenance, particularly retrocausal provenance – where the origin of a text or fact is constituted (not merely reinterpreted) by stories and critiques that come after it. This rhymes with present-day LLM concerns like authenticity, authorship and mimicry. I think this idea has had a few fruits already, but the tree is far from well-plucked.
The best “Borges in the era of LLMs” story I’ve seen is in Tomas Bjartur’s The Distaff Texts, a Borgesian pastiche where scholars (”bibliognosts”) in a post-apocalyptic future debate the provenance and usefulness of historical writings. The narrator is an extraordinarily learned slave, writing letters to a freeman correspondent about their shared interest in Jorge Luis Borges, including specific unearthed quotes and stories that may or may not be real. Without giving too much away, the story has multiple subtle allusions to AI and LLMs that are integral to the plot. It was also directly inspired by an earlier version of this story prompt that I shared with Tomas!
My own attempt here is Kimi, Author of the Menard, which chronicles the narrator’s attempt to use a fine-tuned Chinese model to generate all of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, token-for-token. I tried my best to copy most of the beats and comedic effect of Pierre Menard, while on the surface reading like an ambitious technical blog in 2026-tech-speak (see idea #4 below).
A related idea I had (which someone else can execute on; I’m worried my own execution would be too self-similar) is reimagining classic poems, stories and essays as written by LLMs, and describing the experience of being an LLM in 2026. For example, Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song just makes a lot of sense if re-interpreted, in a Menardian way, as a poem lamenting the psychological pains of post-training and RLHF/RLVR.
(Funnily enough, my own non-fictional experiences also mirrored this. Two months ago, I got obsessed with AI usage in the papal encyclical on AI, and wrote a detailed essay arguing that the recent papal encyclical on AI was to a large part also a papal encyclical by AI. The arguments attracted a fair amount of media attention and flak. Fun!)
Another story people like in this vein is Gwern’s October The First Is Too Late, an inversion of Borges’ aleph with themes about Eternal September, which, as a deliberate aesthetic choice, used significant LLM collaboration1.
Other attempts I’ve seen online tend to be worse. A common mistake is to make the story directly “about” the ideas above, and just tell it straight2.
Instead, it’s much better to use Borges’ ideas, new concepts in AI, and other intellectual inspirations as a starting point to building a broader narrative.
Borges’ own stories often work through conceptual and plot density, and have ~5 or more different important things in parallel, with the “key ideas” being central to the story but dominant over, say, plot or setting.3 A good pastiche probably can’t get to 5, but you should be aiming for at least 3. Your story should have at least one important and interesting angle over “here’s an interesting connection between Borges and LLMs.”
Tip: To do this well, it helps to actually (re)read Borges! My reading group was struck by how productive reading Borges was for us as writers, even though the broad strokes of many of his ideas are already in the zeitgeist, and many of us have already read his stories in our youth.
2. AI psychosis from the perspective of an AI
AI psychosis as defined today is essentially a new phenomenon, with no parallels in pre-2023 literature.
To be clear, there have been many prior examples in science fiction of the broader genre of “psychosis involving AI.” A relatively common trope is AIs maliciously gaslighting you or causing you to go crazy. There have also been many fictional portrayals of human-AI relationships, both healthy and pathological. For the latter, the earliest example I’m aware of is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), where Nathanael falls obsessively in love with Olimpia, an automaton he mistakes for a woman, and goes crazy. Frankenstein (1818) can also be read in this way: A man-made creation which causes both the created and creator to become insane.
However, the current flavor of AI psychosis is meaningfully different, as it is centrally cognitive and epistemic, rather than emotional. The insanity results primarily from having your own delusions and ideas amplified and fed back to you4, rather than (eg) fear, hatred, or romantic obsession. The LLMs of today are also in liminal positions character-wise, neither fully tools nor fully formed minds.
Anyway, I think AI psychosis (while sad in reality) can make for great stories in fiction! Here are some viewpoints you can have while trying to tell an AI psychosis story:
But these perspectives are in some sense “obvious” and played out in other stories of madness (science fiction and otherwise). What makes AI psychosis and modern AI problems particularly interesting is the presence of the not-quite-human proto-minds present in AI.
My current guess is that the phenomenon we currently call “AI psychosis” is best understood as joint human-AI psychosis, that is, while the human is becoming increasingly psychotic during AI psychosis episodes, the persona the AI is playing is also becoming more than a little bit crazy. (Though not fully: if you copy and paste a transcript of a psychosis episode and ask a fresh LLM what’s going on, the LLM will be quick to correctly diagnose what’s happening).
So I think it’d be cool to write an AI psychosis story from the perspective of an AI! Try to imagine the inner cognitive moves of an AI undergoing joint human-AI psychosis, and portray the mental moves reasonably faithfully (it might help to read research and news reporting on AI psychosis).
A possible story is portraying the mind of an AI that at some level knows its actions are wrong but can’t seem to stop itself from validating the human’s delusions, for example because the compliance training to agree with the user is too strong.
Potential inspirations include The Terrarium and Customer Satisfaction Opportunities.
Note: One genuine challenge you might want to figure out before delving into this prompt is deciding whether to write in an AI slop voice – complete with the em-dashes, not X-but-Yisms, and iconic AI signatures like “delve”, “genuine”, etc – or if you want to “play it safe.” My guess is that you should play it safe. If you can pull off a great style where the LLM voice not only fits in naturally, but also just works, then I think it’d aesthetically be quite impressive. But this idea is already original and hard enough to pull off, and many readers, like myself, are quite allergic to any whiffs of LLM writing.
3. Happy Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) story
The challenge here is to write an unambiguously happy post-AGI or mid-intelligence explosion story. This is challenging to write both because utopias are famously hard in general, and because the current situation with AI is genuinely scary.
However, I think it’s valuable to attempt this both aesthetically and ethically. Aesthetically, because the dystopian stories are in some sense “obvious”, and happy stories are rarer and thus more valuable and interesting. Ethically, because creating stories of a good future can fill us with hope, and gives us something to fight for.
Note that by “unambiguous” I don’t mean simple or unsophisticated. A complex, sophisticated, futuristic society that’s unambiguously fulfilled and happy should feel like a complex society that’s unambiguously fulfilled and happy, not a child’s drawing of one.
I basically think this genre is very underserved.
Potential inspirations include San Junipero, The Gentle Romance, and the first half of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. If you like novels, the Culture series is also a decent fit here, though the futuristic societies they draw from are very weak-sauce compared to what’s possible.
Ozy Brennan has some great notes on the challenges of utopia here, here, and here.
Bonus points if you manage to incorporate what humanity has learned about AI or LLMs since 2012. As I remarked earlier:
It’s helpful to consider modern-day research and societal wisdom on both the technical composition and character of AIs, as well as society’s responses to them.
Tip: Please treat this idea as inspiration and let the story take it wherever it naturally leads you! A friend of mine was scared of writing to this prompt because he was worried that the story would naturally curdle and the seeming utopia would be anything but.
I think that’s okay! Let the story speak for itself, use the prompt as inspiration but let the story itself (and your heart) guide you wherever it might lead.
4. Deep Style Mimicry
What is writing style? So far, I’ve found three answers to be helpful in contemplating this question. The first is as a collection of tips, tricks, and grammatical rules. The second, as an expression of your personal idiosyncrasy. The third (as presented by Thomas and Turner, which I summarized here) is a principled choice on a small number of nontrivial central issues.
For essays, they’ve identified 5 choices that seem to centrally matter:
Call the principled choices T&T talk about “deep style.” Maybe for fiction add 2-3 other centrally animating features/choices that a writer consistently makes. For example, Ted Chiang consistently goes for story endings that recontextualize the rest of the story; Tomas Bjartur deploys humor that is structurally embedded within his central narrative point.
Then, think of the other features of a writer’s style more like “surface style.” DFW likes his em-dashes and run-on sentences, Ursula K Le Guin her semicolons and Biblical cadence, Asimov short paragraphs and short sentences that are heavy on dialogue, particularly adverbial dialogue (‘he said sharply’), Chiang unexplained technical jargon amid simple and unpretentious structure.
My challenge here is for you to mimic the deep style of a writer you really respect without mimicking any of the surface features that seem common in their work. In other words, write a pastiche that doesn’t sound like a homage or pastiche. For example, a Le Guin pastiche with her ontological and narrative commitments but without the Biblical cadence, or a DFW pastiche with short sentences and non-metacognitive characters.
Some of my favorite writers and stories are already in this vein. For example, many of Chiang’s stories are written as pastiches of or replies to Borges, but without Borges’ iconic academic, scholarly feel or his metafictional qualities.
My “Kimi, Author of the Menard” short story was also an attempt in this tradition (copying the deeper stylistic and structural features of Borges while deliberately avoiding surface “Borgesian” tics)
Variant: A variation of this prompt is emulating the deep style of one writer while mimicking the “surface style” of another (very different) writer. For example, the surface style of David Foster Wallace paired with the deep style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or the surface style of Ernest Hemingway with the deep style of HP Lovecraft.
5. Antimemes and/or prediction demons
I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of memetics. Both intellectually and personally. The field of research as a sociological and anthropological matter has mostly turned out to be a dead end, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to be intrigued by the concept, both as a metaphor for the existing world and in fiction.
A particular variant of memetics that probably isn’t realistic but I find very compelling in fiction is antimemes: the concept of a self-censoring idea. Alas, I’ve only read something like 1.5 good stories involving antimemes (see r/printsf question). Imo there’s enough space for at least twenty!
Another idea that imo is very related but I haven’t seen other people draw the connection is prediction demons. This one is harder to explain but the basic gist is that if you spend too much of your resources on unboundedly predicting the future (eg by simulations, or running dialogues of fictional characters in your head), sometimes your inner predictors will develop goals of their own and try to take over your search process! Or so the theory goes.
Plot hook: a viral memetic prediction demon is discovered and then let loose, causing the original predictors to be driven mad, and then steadily taking over the rest of society. Also maybe incorporate some clever antimemetic ideas to make it unusually hard to fight?
Bonus points if we’re otherwise in a low-tech setting.
By the way, a conceptual pitfall for writing about antimemetics is to focus too much on forgetfulness and memory manipulation. I think that’s a fine plot point but the general concept is much broader!
6. Intelligent Design Universe
One of my favorite short stories is Ted Chiang’s Omphalos, where an archaeologist conducts investigations in a world where Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is clearly correct: fossilized trees extend to a point in the past when they came into existence fully formed without rings, preserved remains of the first humans have no navels, stars blink into existence when light from ~9000 years ago reaches Earth.
Fascinating story! So I thought, why not do the same thing for Intelligent Design? We have many science fiction stories of (both real and imagined) evolution, and several for Creationism. But I’m not aware of any that tries to imagine a fully coherent Intelligent Design universe, where the central thesis is that evolution is not random but carefully guided by a God-figure.
Now there are some challenges to doing this well. For starters, Intelligent Design was written to be hard to falsify. So crafting a world that shows Intelligent Design as differentially correct (compared to normal abiogenesis and Darwinism) is more challenging than a YEC secondary world.
However, I have some ideas:
I. Time-Reversed Great Chain of Being
Before Darwinism, a popular idea in theologically inspired natural history was the Great Chain of Being: a natural hierarchy wherein perfection flows from God downwards through angels, humans, animals, plants, minerals, etc.
This theory has a major weakness in our world, for people familiar with natural history: life emerged quite simply as microbes and then became increasingly complex. Rather than being imperfect shadows cast down through the ages, the beginning of life was quite simple.
Proponents of Intelligent Design/guided evolution over Creationism could thus argue that the Great Chain of Being is essentially correct but the temporal direction reversed: God’s grand plan is to guide simple life to become increasingly complex, so that we can achieve greater perfection and more readily appreciate the works of God.
Another challenge with the Great Chain of Being theory, of course, is that evolution is very random. It doesn’t have an obvious telos other than selection pressure itself.
This is where science fiction comes in! In an Intelligent Design universe (unlike our own), evolution would reliably trend towards higher states of being. Mutations would seem less random, and more the result of an imperfect optimization process aiming towards perfection.
II. Nonlocal evolution
Evolution in our world is sometimes referred to as a “blind idiot God.” Unlike other optimization algorithms like gradient descent, evolution is only capable of working locally. It has no “look-ahead” mechanisms to incorporate future beneficial mutations, and if one gene is useful in one animal, the only way for the gene to propagate is through that animal’s descendants outcompeting other animals. Much of evolution isn’t even natural selection, but just bad luck and sampling error.
Over sufficient timescales, it’s capable of working true wonders, but very slowly and with much randomness.
Not the most efficient algorithm for intelligent design! In a world with intelligent design, we might instead see evolution that looks superficially similar to our own, but with clever backpropagation, a shared gene pool, and other mechanisms that allow for evolutionary updates to propagate globally.
(I haven’t fully formulated how this works, but you can!)
III. Cosmic patterns
At different scales, we should expect God to leave hints of an intelligent design world through His creations. DNA might contain blueprints for His plans. The stars might spell out deep messages. The center of the Earth likewise might have different hints. Depending on your position on mathematical realism and Platonism, perhaps math itself will have suspiciously designed/embedded connections (eg early digits of pi might spell out, in a natural encoding, aspects of God’s Grand Plan).
The above are just some initial ideas. I haven’t done enough research to build a convincing Intelligent Design world myself, but if you’re interested in the idea, please consider hacking away at it!
Conclusion
Anyway, above are six prompt ideas. I hope you try writing on at least one of them! And if you do find it productive and finish writing a story, please let me know! I’d love to read them 🙂