Thirty-One Flavors Of Fiction That Could Be Attempted

1. The usual medical drama features a brilliant but somehow personally flawed or anti-social physician. It would be interesting to imagine one that is, instead, about an admittedly mediocre or dull physician, just barely qualified medically to do their job, and perhaps a little corrupt as well, so not truly righteous, who nonetheless basically moral and makes a positive difference by falling back on the medical basics and by recognizing and addressing the non-medical concerns of this physician's patients.

2. If one wanted to do a "hard science" story about aliens, how could one do it without faster-than-light travel? Suppose that somehow someone in our solar system with an advanced space based radio telescope intercepted transmissions from another advanced civilization without faster-than-light travel many light years away. Suppose further that these transmissions were sufficiently rich to figure out their language(s) and to follow the story playing out amongst the aliens. This would leave the author free reign to develop a very different (and yet in some essentials, similar) culture and world. The aliens' stories, in turn would impact the solar system based observers despite the fact that it doesn't directly impact them and they can't really meaningfully interact with the aliens. Perhaps, for example, our solar system observers might witness transmissions from the fall of their civilization and gain insights from it that would guide them in trying to prevent humans from making the same mistakes. The solar system observers might also glean technological advances that could be utilized by us.

3. There are several places in the solar system: the atmosphere of Venus, and the gas clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, for example, where the most habitable regions would be for life that was perpetually aloft rather than on the surface of some rocky or icy planet. A hard science fiction story of first contact with an intelligent species that is part of a larger aeolian ecosystem in one or more of these places could be promising.

4. There have been a number of science fiction stories about human scientists deliberately nudging other species along to become sentient species on a par with our own. One of the most promising, but least explored, of these possibilities, is the possibility of sentient octopi, who are already quite intelligent and have the physical traits necessary to be tool users but whose intelligence is as different from our own as almost any other on Earth. The main problem that prevents them from realizing this potential is that they have a great many young who receive no parental care once they are born and are eaten in large quantities by all manner of other creatures in the sea. A story taking place near the end of this process as we begin to share the world with another fully sentient species that we helped to create could be fascinating.

5. A hard science fiction story exploring the consequences in the not so distant future, of widespread biohacking and genetic engineering for longevity and other traits.

6. A hard scientific Jurassic Park style de-extinction drama, but involving mostly Pleistocene mammal species (which are much more feasible), rather than dinosaurs, and a less tragic ending.

7. A story exploring the co-existing of various archaic hominins and modern humans that we know happened several times in human history, perhaps a "Clan of the Cave Bear" type story, but with Denisovans and hobbits making first contact with modern humans.

8. A century or two in the future, climate change driven by fossil fuels will have run its course, fossil fuels themselves will have ceased to play a significant economic role even if it persists in some niches, Africa will have undergone economic development and experienced the demographic transition seen everyplace else that has experienced economic development, the global population will have fallen significantly from a peak of perhaps 9-10 billion people, Islam will have transformed from a current state that is a bit like Victorian Christian civilization to something more like modern Christianity, Christianity will have become a minority religion in most places outside of Africa in the face of secularization, and science will have advanced to the point where we know the laws of physics at the most fundamental levels without the various unsolved problems and open questions we have today. All this plausibly prophecy for the future needs is the right kind of story to unveil this world, and to identify the new central conflicts that have emerged in it, perhaps a heroes journey, or a journey of exploration, or a flight from some peril.

9. What would the world look like in the future if the so called "Axis of Evil" ends up winning, perhaps with the complicity of a MAGA America? What would the regression of global civilization look like in that new dark age? I would expect a future in that scenario that is dystopian but not apocalyptic, in which some small resistance or movement tries to get return humanity to a path of progress, and our hero joins that movement. 

10. We know that there was once a farming civilization, thousands of years ago at a suitable moment in climate history, in what is now the Amazon jungle. At some point, the climate changes, the civilization collapsed, and the jungle came to be in its current state. Imagine a story, or perhaps a series of stories or short stories, all set in this civilization trying to imagine it as fully and accurately as possible.

11. The Younger Dryas climate event profoundly impacted much of the world about three thousand years before farming and herding was invented, at a moment when the Clovis culture was thriving in North America, and when proto-farming and megalithic ritual centers were starting to develop in Anatolia. In North America, this climate event tipped the balance provided by the ecological pressure of human hunters, to result in a mass megafauna extinction. In Anatolia, this climate event delayed the development of agriculture by about three thousand years. There would be plenty of room for the stories of people who lived just before, during, and after the Younger Dryas event.

12. The modern collection of military conflicts that I call the Sahel War in Africa is a climate driven conflict that is epic and primal, giving rise to genocidal wars between Muslims in the north, whose ancestors were traditionally herders, and Christians and animists in the south, whose ancestors were traditionally farmers, as the slowly expanding Sahara desert creeps southward, pushing herders into the farmers' territory as their own land become uninhabitable. There are many stories that could be written in the context of this ongoing conflict from both sides, or perhaps in the context of a young couple with a herder and farmer from opposite sides of the conflict.

13. The ancestors of the Chadic people of Africa made an epic journey from the place we now call Moldova to Lake Chad at the peak of the Green Sahara period. A story, perhaps a multi-generational one, of their journey and of the society they build upon arriving at Lake Chad, would be a worthy one.

14. Another epic, possibly multi-generational journey worth describing in fiction based upon pre-history would be that of the Austronesian mariners who settled Madagascar via East Africa, and also brought the banana to Africa.

15. Swahili civilization arose when Arabic speaking maritime traders entered into marriages with high status local women along their trade routes along the eastern coast of Africa. The ethnogenesis of this civilization could provide a great backdrop for all manner of stories.

16. It would be interesting to read stories set in the early days of the Islamic empire, concretely filling in the blanks with best available hunches, on what fueled its explosive expansion in a matter of decades and the experience of the first wave of people converting to Islam that made this attractive to them. 

17. It would also be interesting to set a story in the medieval period at urban centers in the Islamic empire where an Islamic renaissance of intellectual progress and cultural flowering was underway. The story of how the lives of women who got divorced in this time period, which was something that happened and was not uncommon at the time (long before divorce was possible in Christendom), in a historically authentic way, could provide at least one important unifying thread to the overall narrative.

18. Some horrible regional war in the medium term future forces a large group of refugees into exile, and they settle in some near Arctic or Antarctic region that global warming has made marginally habitable, or in someplace like Texas that has become increasingly uninhabitable causing most people to move away, in a story of pioneering colonization on a last frontier on Earth.

19. A murder mystery, a few decades in the future, some sprawling megacity in the developing world or third-world city, perhaps in a more backward part of India developing on the late side, or Southeast Asia, or Africa.

20. Some political faction in a gridlocked political system, resorts to assassinations to achieve its political goals, authorities try to thwart them with mixed success.

21. A story recounting the rise of a new religion, along the lines of the 2010 series "Caprica" (a Battlestar galactic prequel), or the 2024 series "Dune Prophecy", that is a better fit in its metaphysics and in the social issues that it addresses, than the Abrahamic faiths that are predominant today.

22. A city killing sized asteroid is headed towards Earth and scientists have greatly narrowed down where it will strike, but political leaders and the rich have declined to mobilize a planetary defense effort. So, instead, the race is on to relocate as many people as possible from the predicted impact area far enough away that they can survive, before it strikes at the appointed time.

23. A retelling of the Bible narrative and some of its extra-canonical books from the perspective of Satan, an angel cast out of heaven because he bucked YHWH's tyrannical rule.

24. A very personal story of the author of some piece of a major work of legendary history and what drives this author to mix elements of historical fact with mythical fiction, perhaps the Iliad, perhaps the Bible, perhaps some other Bronze Age mythology.

25. The Second Amendment is repealed and slowly but surely the population of the United States is disarmed in a series of conflicts with reluctant gun nuts that ultimately end decisively against them. Tyranny does not follow.

26. Vice has been legalized, but only in designated areas that were formerly industrial or in the middle of nowhere. Our protagonist is a public official charged with helping people who have started to drown in this and need treatment, and identifying abuses that need to be ended.

27. A woman from a strict and wealthy Muslim family de-converts while she is a foreign student in the U.S. where she is chased by extended family members and the Islamic government of her home country, in an effort to subject her to a honor killing. With the help of allies she meets along the way, she tries to stay alive and make a life for herself.

28. A short story of a woman who is charged with sorcery in Saudi Arabia and ultimately executed for it, ideally based as much as possible on one or more true stories.

29. All of the women and a couple of the men in the senior class of a high school, with varied well developed individual characters, in an isolated rural hot springs resort town, inspired by a science fiction story that a few of them read, form a polyamorous pod and have and raise children in it.

30. Oil runs out or becomes worthless, in much the way that coal is starting to, or already has, in North America of Europe. The economies of oil states start to collapse. Our protagonist is a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family as the monarchy must choose a path to either constitutional monarchy or being replaced entirely in the face of dramatically declining economic prospects, particularly when it is discovered that the sovereign wealth fund of the country has been embezzled on a massive scale and invested in failed nepotism and politics driven investments.

31. A relict colony of archaic hominins are discovered deep in an Indonesian jungle and scientists make contact with them and study them. They find that they are more human than they expected them to be, while still clearly not being modern humans.

Note also that science fiction, and really all speculative fiction, really involves all other genres of fiction, but in disguise.