Science fiction gives writers more room to work with than any other genre.
You can set stories in automated houses after nuclear war, space stations orbiting dying stars, or a version of Earth where precognition has eliminated crime. The only constraint is internal consistency. Whatever rules your world works under, they need to hold up. That freedom is also what makes the genre intimidating, and it’s where I’ve watched most science fiction manuscripts come apart. When anything is possible, deciding what your story is about becomes the hardest part. These techniques work for novels and short fiction alike.
This genre beats almost any other for me, and I get impatient with writers who treat it as a gadget catalog. The spaceship and the time machine are the easy part. The hard part is the person standing inside the machine, and a science fiction book that forgets that person bores me no matter how clever its physics is.
What Defines the Science Fiction Genre?
Richard Lowe's science fiction compass: favorite writers plotted from people to physics and from order to chaos.
Speculation grounded in science or technology: stories that ask what would happen if something that isn’t true yet became true.
When anything is possible, deciding what your story is about becomes the hardest part.Share on X
Science fiction explores the human condition against speculative backdrops.
The focus can range from advanced technology and extraterrestrial life to dystopian futures and parallel universes. The best science fiction uses those speculative elements to examine something real about how people think, feel, and behave. Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” blends artificial intelligence and religion in a few thousand words, proving that short science fiction can convey ideas as deep as any novel. Ray Bradbury‘s “There Will Come Soft Rains” sets an entire post-apocalyptic narrative inside a single automated house, with no living human characters. Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” explores empathy and what it means to be human through the lens of android detection, later becoming the basis for Blade Runner. Each of these works starts with a speculative premise and uses it to say something about us. That’s the genre’s core strength, and a book that skips it is a technical manual with characters in it.
Watch: How 'Hard Science Fiction Novels' get written | Tim Poston | TEDxNITKSurathkal, TEDx Talks
How do you build a science fiction world?
World-building is where science fiction lives or dies. The universe you create needs its own rules, societies, technologies, and logic, and every element should serve the narrative instead of exist as decoration. Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” creates an entire artificial universe inhabited by air-powered beings within a short story. His careful attention to the mechanics of how that world works makes an impossible premise feel inevitable. H.G. Wells‘ “The Star” builds a convincing global catastrophe from a single premise: a rogue celestial body colliding with Neptune and the cascading effects on Earth. The key with world-building is restraint, and it’s the hardest discipline in the genre. You need to know far more about your world than you ever put on the page. Readers should feel the depth without being buried in it. I’ve cut whole chapters of invented history out of my own drafts and never missed one of them.
I think the info dump is the most common way writers ruin a good science fiction premise. They fall in love with their own research and give the reader pages of invented history before anything happens. The reader came for a story, and plenty of them put the book down long before the story arrives.
How do you create believable characters in science fiction?
No matter how vast your universe, readers connect with people. Your characters need to grow and change through the story, and readers need to understand what they want and what’s stopping them from getting it. In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” the protagonist John Anderton faces moral and existential dilemmas within a tight narrative.
His personal stakes drive the plot more than the speculative technology around him. In Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” the young protagonist transforms from a misunderstood child into humanity’s last hope, and the alien war matters less than that personal transformation, and the transformation is what hooks readers.
Characters don’t have to be human, and some of my own favorites aren’t. Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” uses an AI named Multivac as its central character, tracing its evolution across billions of years. Multivac works because Asimov gives it a clear purpose and an arc that builds toward something meaningful.
Plot and Themes
From Author Talks
Stephen Oram writes near-future fiction about artificial intelligence and biotech, and whether the technology delivers what it promises. He discussed the territory on Author Talks.
Plots in science fiction often start with a “what if” question. What if robots gained self-awareness? What if humans could travel faster than light? What if time travel existed but one small change in the past destroyed the future? The answer to that question becomes your plot. Asimov’s “The Last Question” spans millennia around a single question. Can entropy be reversed?
I think the info dump is the most common way writers ruin a good science fiction premise.
The narrative keeps circling back to the same question asked by different characters across different eras, and the payoff is among the most satisfying endings in short fiction. Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” uses time travel to explore the butterfly effect, showing that a short story with the right premise and theme can hit as hard as any novel. The themes you choose are what a reader carries out of the book. Science fiction that grapples with technology’s impact on society, humanity’s response to the unknown, or the ethical implications of scientific advancement stays with people. Readers forget science fiction that grapples with nothing by the end of the week.
Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama is a phenomenal book, and its ending does the same thing. The alien ship leaves, and the mystery is never solved. Then one of the scientists realizes the Ramans always do things in threes. That was only one spaceship, so two more are coming. A film adaptation has been in development for years, with Denis Villeneuve, who directed Dune, attached.
My own science fiction taught me how hard this gets. I worked on Peacekeeper for about 45 years. It was my first significant novel and a very complicated one, and for decades I couldn’t make it work. I loved the idea, so I kept changing it and playing with it until I finally cracked it. Mostly I had to become a better writer and learn a lot more about my scenario and my characters.
Point of view gave me the most trouble. The novel has dozens and dozens of characters, some who last only a few minutes, spread across different spaceships, each with its own little scenario, so several points of view run at the same time. Shield of Ashes, which I wrote right after it, is far more complicated. It’s about World War III, runs about triple the length, and has wars, battles, spies, civilians and surprises all going at once. The trouble is keeping track of it all.
My novels don’t tend to be simple. They twist and turn because that’s how I think. Zork had a line for it: you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. That’s my mind. Once I accepted that and stopped fighting it, I finished Peacekeeper, and then Shield of Ashes.
When writers show me science fiction, I push hardest on what the premise has to say. A clever premise with nothing to say entertains a reader for an afternoon and then evaporates. I’d rather read a small story about one family facing one strange machine than a galaxy-spanning epic with no idea behind it.
How Do You Publish Short Science Fiction?
Short science fiction is an accessible entry point for newer authors.
The format encourages tight writing and innovation, and digital publishing has made reaching readers easier than ever. Platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) let you set your own price and reach Amazon’s customer base directly. Andy Weir initially released “The Martian” as a serialized story on his website before turning it into an eBook due to popular demand. N.K. Jemisin’s short story “Emergency Skin” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2020 as part of Amazon’s Forward Collection. Both show that short science fiction can build audiences and attract attention from traditional publishers. Even established authors like Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin built their reputations partly through short fiction before expanding into novels.
Short fiction has an open road to readers now. For decades a handful of magazine editors decided which new voices got a hearing, and a lot of good writers quit after a stack of rejection slips. (See an editor’s guide to selling science fiction) Today a writer can put a story in front of readers and let them decide, and I think that’s healthier for the genre.
Frank Herbert found out how narrow that gate was. Analog magazine had already serialized Dune, and about twenty book publishers still turned the novel down, according to JSTOR Daily.
The house that finally took it was Chilton Books, then known mostly for auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor there, had read the serial and contacted Herbert’s agent. Chilton printed 2,200 copies in 1965 at $5.95 each, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America reports that sales were bad enough that Lanier was dismissed after the first year.
Dune went on to win the Hugo and the Nebula, and Ace made it a bestseller in paperback. I think about how close that book came to never finding its readers. It took one editor at a car manual publisher who happened to read a magazine, and plenty of good writers never got that lucky.
| Element | What it needs | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Premise | A speculative idea that says something real about people | “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” |
| World-building | Consistent rules, restraint, and far more known than shown | Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” |
| Characters | Personal stakes that drive the plot more than the technology | “The Minority Report,” “Ender’s Game” |
| Non-human characters | A clear purpose and an arc that builds | Multivac in “The Last Question” |
| Plot | A “what if” question whose answer becomes the story | “The Last Question”: can entropy be reversed? |
| Themes | Technology’s impact, the unknown, or the ethics of science | “A Sound of Thunder” |
| Publishing | Short fiction as the accessible entry point | “The Martian,” “Emergency Skin” |
Short Science Fiction Worth Reading
If you want to understand what works in short science fiction, read these:
- “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster: A future society where humans live underground and rely entirely on a machine. Explores technological dependence and loss of human connection.
- “The Jaunt” by Stephen King: Teleportation exists, but the consequences come with a twist that questions the nature of reality.
- “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut: A dystopian society where everyone is forced to be equal. Satirical examination of extreme egalitarianism.
- “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang: Hugo Award winner. A future Beijing that physically folds and restructures itself. Explores social inequality.
- “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury: A society where technology has isolated people and criminalized the act of taking a walk.
- “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov: Spans billions of years exploring whether entropy can be reversed. Among the genre’s most celebrated short stories.
- “Arena” by Fredric Brown: Interstellar gladiatorial combat between a human and an alien. Raises questions about warfare and the value of life.
- “The Egg” by Andy Weir: A philosophical story challenging perception of life, death, and interconnectedness.
You can also learn about writing romance, mystery, and fantasy.
Whatever you write, keep the people at the center. Science fiction that uses its characters as tour guides for the author’s inventions is dull, and readers think so too. Build the strangest world you can imagine, then make me care about one person trying to survive in it, and you’ll have written something worth publishing. (More on Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook)
My take
Science fiction lives or dies on one person the reader cares about. Invent whatever world you like, then keep its rules consistent and let it change the people living there. Characters who exist to tour the reader through your inventions are dull. Start with short fiction if you’re new, because it’s the easiest way into print. Read the classics on that list before you write your own.
People Also Ask
- Dune at 50, JSTOR Daily
- How to Fix Your Ornithopter: The Unlikely Publishing History of Dune, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association
- N. K. Jemisin’s Short Story Emergency Skin Wins 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, Amazon
Writing It Yourself? Keep Going.
If you want a professional in your corner while you write, my writing coaching works one on one without taking the pen out of your hand. The Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook takes this topic deeper.
