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How you're doing Reddit! I have developed a sci-fi world concept based on system theory, thermodynamics, and neuroscience. The core law of this universe: Stagnation = Death.

In nature, there is no absolute rest. When a state or a civilization freezes in one place, it accelerates its structural, environmental, and informational entropy. To fight this inevitable decay, humanity has to abandon sedentary life.

1. The Core Setting: The Physics of Social Entropy

This is a Hard Sci-Fi world with realistic economics and sociology. Stagnation manifests differently in every system, acting as a terminal disease:

• Material & Environmental Entropy: Land locked in one place rots. Soil loses its micronutrients, aquifers dry up, and industrial pollution reaches critical stagnation points. The ecosystem enters a state of "thermal death."

• Systemic & Bureaucratic Entropy: In fixed states, institutions ossify. Elites grow like tumors into the local infrastructure. Border disputes ferment for centuries, turning into toxic geopolitical waste.

• Neurological & Social Entropy: The human brain is a predictive engine. When the environment becomes 100% predictable, dopamine and neurogenesis plummet. Societies slip into terminal boredom, psychological burnout, and isolation epidemics—like modern crises of millions of abandoned houses and hundreds of thousands of hikikomori locked in their rooms, their neural networks literally decaying from a lack of new stimuli.

1. The Anti-Entropy Engine: How Rotation Resets the System

Humanity does not move its buildings; they cycle through fixed capital cities built around the globe. Every 15-20 years, entire nations completely rotate and swap territories, using physical movement as a global heat sink for entropy:

• The Infrastructure Reset: While a nation moves along the orbital path, their previous land "rests" and naturally desynchronizes from human pressure. When a tech-driven nation arrives at a decayed, aging sector, they refuse to live in ruins. They deploy automated construction and 3D printing to rebuild the area from scratch, chasing a new "American Dream" loop. The former cemetery of houses instantly transforms into a high-tech eco-suburb.

• The Neurological Shock: The forced change of landscape acts as a controlled "micro-injury" to the collective brain. The hikikomori cannot hide because their safe boxes are scheduled for rotation. Forced into a new environment, the neocortex floods with BDNF, restarting neurogenesis. The system forces the mind to stay young through adaptation.

• Eliminating Information Waste: Long-term crime ("cold cases") drops drastically. Criminals survive by blending into stagnant, predictable environments. The massive reshuffling of population, data, and local police forces every 20 years forcefully pushes any hidden anomalies to the surface. Archives are constantly scrubbed clean by new eyes.

• The Micro-Lore ("Memory Contraband"): While people must leave the cities clean, humans are imperfect. Leaving a hidden photograph, a note, or a toy in a wall acts as "memory contraband"—a chaotic radiation of someone else's life that disrupts the new family’s synchronization with the house, creating local ripples of domestic mystery.

1. The Narrative: Present Day vs. The Future

The story spans two generations, creating a brilliant hard sci-fi study of systemic choices, told through the eyes of ordinary people:

• The Present (Act I): The world is decaying from peak entropy. South Korea and Japan are facing a demographic collapse and a hikikomori epidemic; the West is torn by immigration crises and border wars. The parents witness the first UFOs as a cosmic warning of "thermal death." They find each other on a secret Reddit thread. In response to the crisis, Korea and Japan reject stagnation and pioneer the radical Great Rotation Pact. Other nations choose different paths (violence or demographic replacement).

• The Future (Act II): 20 years later, the children grow up to see the consequences of these paths. The Anglo-American line is a paranoid military zone (having invaded neighbors just to grab fresh land), and the European line has dissolved into cultural chaos and cold-case backlogs due to forced population replacement.

• The Korean-Japanese System Triumph: By forcing cities and populations to rotate, they have completely cured loneliness. Depression has been eliminated through environmental neurogenesis, and birth rates have skyrocketed because every 15 years people get to experience the dopamine rush of building a new dream home. The entire population is biologically and mentally rejuvenated.

1. The Climax: The Second Wave of UFOs (System Bugs)

It is at this peak contrast that the children of the original Reddit users face a second wave of reality-bending UFO encounters. The universe demands balance—by pushing the planet into constant movement, the fabric of spacetime itself begins to glitch around these children:

• The First Child encounters a UFO, and his own older self steps out of it. The clone stays to live on Earth. How will two versions of the same brain synchronize?

• The Second Child completely loses all biological memory of the contact. The only proof is a video file recorded on his phone. He knows it happened, but his neurons are a blank slate.

• The Third Child witnesses a UFO covered in all the flags of the world. A figure steps out, rapidly shifting faces, races, voices, and languages every single second—a walking system bug. A moment later, the entity and the ship simply annihilate into thin air.

Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding Rules:

1. No Absurdity: This is a grounded, realistic setting. We rely on actual system theory, real economics, sociopolitical dynamics, and neurological science.

2. Logistics Matter: We will explore how this works. How do automated international maintenance corps keep life support running during the swap?

3. Psychological Depth: We look at how different human temperaments adapt to this lifestyle.

I don't care about money; I just want to bring this world to life as a collaborative project, an anthology of short stories, or a web novel.

If you love deep worldbuilding, system dynamics, and philosophical sci-fi thrillers—let’s write this together! Comment below or DM me.

So alongside this other sci-fi world im making, im trying to make one about a coalition of people fight against this massive corporation that, in the most dystopia-like way possible, owns everything.

How do I introduce it?

For context, I am a thriller writer who occasionally writes horror too and is not too into science and stuff. I randomly came up with a story idea about a video game character's ai becoming sentient and coming to life(having a robot-like solid body, along the lines of Terminator maybe). I'm thinking the plot like game devs make it kinda VR or something involving holograms to make the experience 'more immersive' maybe. I don't know that much about science and don't want to just slap the word 'quantum' and call it a day. Though I specifically want him to come to life through a technology the game makers were advertising(consequences of their own actions basically)

Please help out a non sci-fi writer here

Edit because I wasn't clear: the ai is made for the game character to seem different everytime a player plays it and not feel repetitive. I don't want it to be completely realistic, I just want it to not seem completely wack. Also, he's not the taking over the world kind of ai, he's after one specific person and pretty chill with anyone else.

Also, have the plot as well(though I won't go into unnecessary details). The game devs design and code the antagonist of the game but after coding everything someone higher up decides that they need a different antagonist and to scrap this one but they don't erase his existence and he still exists in the game files, proceeds to take over the system, escapes and goes to kill the guy who scrapped his character

Note: I am NOT a sci-fi writer so I will probably get basically everything wrong. The only sci-fi piece of media I've consumed in the Matrix and the Terminator movies

"After Earth is destroyed by an alien empire, the human race has scattered out across frontier space with the assistance of other alien species who offer their services and care as they too have lost their home worlds! This story follows a small group of astronaut friends and family (both humans and aliens alike) who settle down on an isolated planet filled with clear ocean water, sand bars, and tropical islands. After the astronauts land their ship on the nearest island, they embrace the tropical air and have fun swimming, surfing, and loving each other. Things seem all well and good until, while swimming underwater, the astronauts find a sunken crashed spaceship."

And this is where the plot stops! I couldn't think very far ahead where I was going with the mystery and suspense of the story. Shameless to say, this is basically inspired by the 2005 movie, Into the Blue with Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, and Josh Brolin. I just love the idea of a group astronauts (both humans and aliens alike) taking a break on a planet that's basically one whole private island! But I'm worried that it might be too similar to the Paul Walker movie.

What do you all think should happen in the story after the astronauts find the sunken spaceship wreckage?

A friend suggested I improve my characterization by reading Wuthering Heights. I had never read it because I had stupidly grouped it with Jane Austen, who I find boring. To reiterate, this was stupid.

Well, I loved the book and still don't know how she plumbed such depth in her characters.

As a scifi writer, what literary fiction authors have helped your writing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/175_Ouzaza6iWlXtaLI0dd7YoQvwcsdtfP_MjjPWs_ac/edit?tab=t.0

this was my first real attempt to wright a book. i came up with the plot for this over months and finally wrote it down over the summer, i'm three chapters in and i'm already through most of the plot, at best it could be a short story if i lengthen it. i stoped writing it a month or two ago and haven't really felt motivated to continue.

i have a new story idea that still needs some work but i feel passionate about, and even if i never do anything with this i feel i've still learned from it. the new story is more of a man v nature thing, were i don't need to plan out the plot start to end.

i'd like you to critique it, so i know if its worth continuing, and so i know what to fix if i chose to wright a new story.

sorry it ends so abruptly, i haven't touched it in a few months so i'm not going to re read ti figure out were i'm at.

This is an idea I've been playing about with for a couple weeks and want to feedback on here. Basically I have this idea for a short story where these people are sent to a planet for a mission, with said planet going through an extreme but slow environmental catastrophe taking place. The environment is meant to pose a challenge to the people but is basically just a background setting for the actual story and not that important.

Basically it's an Earth-like planet that supports diverse life and with a moon similar to ours. However sometime in the past few million years a rogue planetoid entered the star system and was miraculously able to insert itself in the planet's orbit; becoming a second moon. My thinking is that this second moon would increase the tidal stress the planet experiences which would result in increased volcanism due to the tidal forces stretching out the crust and causing more volcanoes to develop.

As well as a massive volcanism event similar to the Great Dying 250 million years ago, I was wondering if because the second moon becomes fixed in orbit, the volcanism would continue and therefore the outpouring of greenhouse gases like CO2 would keep going - rising both the planet's temperature and atmospheric pressure over a long period until the surface became absolutely inhospitable to life.

Would this concept work or is there something I'm not considering? Such as overestimating how powerful a second moon is in terms of tidal forces or how volcanoes actually form?

So its a common problem to explain why your characters on a space ship aren't floating around

Some hard solutions include centrifugal gravity, but that severely restricts ship design, which is a major aspect of scifi that deals with interstellar scales

But then comes the problem of artificial gravity generators. They work, but the implications make them too op, since it implies the civilization can artificially convert other forms of energy into gravity.
That is, very high tier in terms of what it can do, and how much advancement would be required for it, even with other explanations like magic-adjacent gravity generating matter like dark matter.

If not, if there's a solution to not make it too op, then tell me.

Another problem is how do you explain the anisotropy of the gravity, since gravity irl propagates from a source in all directions.

I have become very fixated on the zero-point field, a very new age religious concept masquerading as science. It's a really cool idea, though, so I have made a few sci-fi concepts that play with the idea that it is real, and how you could logically apply it to scientific development. I'm curious if anyone here has any ideas that are even more extreme than anything I have come up with.

If you don't know, the field is a premise where the creator, Lynne McTaggart, believes that because in a vacuum at absolute zero you can still see quantum movements (which is a real thing) this is evidence that our brains can interact with quantum particles and change reality (this part is not real, obviously lol). The idea then becomes that you need to focus your intention in order to shape reality to get whatever you want.
There are some boundaries to this. Namely, she specifies that warping the field is easier when you're asleep, but it is harder to focus intention; therefore people in comas or who suffer brain damage are uniquely primed to utilize the field. It also plays by schrodinger's cat rules, which means you can change the past, but only if the thing in the past is unobserved. Observation would collapse the superposition.

For the purposes of my stories, I explored the idea of what it would take to properly manipulate the field. This resulted in government projects to put large amounts of people in comas and inject subliminal messages into their brains to channel massive amounts of intention at once. This would be used for conceptual weapons, weapons that can simply change the nature of a target to have never existed. I'm sure there are also insane political and world-shaping implications to unlocking this kind of technology which would be absolutely horrifying to hand anyone.

The other big idea I used was field-powered warp drives. The idea is that you can direct intention in order to exploit quantum entanglement and allow a vessel to simply be wherever it needs to be. Optionally, a drone could be sent out to photograph the area for channeling and quantum purposes, but there are potential loopholes. I just think it is an interesting boundary for warp drives to have.

Are there any more interesting applications for the field, or for general quantum antics that assume the field is actually real?

title says it all, if a future human society could achieve efficient 60-70 percent light speed travel. would their be any reason to colonise a rogue planet about 7.5 light years away assuming it has rocky moons that can be landed on?

also would their be any way to generate enough power on wise to either manufacture the antimatter for the return trip or build a laser array to push laser sail ships back?

and finally however unlikely could life potentially evolve around one of its potential moons. if it had enough internal thermal energy and an atmosphere. and without a star the risk of radiation is reduced

Hey all!

I love a good post-apocalyptic sci-fi story in the likes of The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, Fallout, etc. However, I always wonder: what if there was actually still a country out there functioning in some capacity? How would life be in the last remnants of civilisation while the rest of the world essentially goes back to the Stone Age? And in this case, what are things you think I should keep in mind to keep it as realistic as possible?

Let’s say in the classic scenario of a global nuclear war, taking place mostly in the northern hemisphere with some hits in Australia and South America, some places might still be able to survive the fallout. One country that often comes to mind is New Zealand. Here’s why:

- Developed island nation, geographically isolated.
- Most probably won’t be targeted during a global nuclear war (low strategic value).
- Low population of 5 million people.
- Produces far more food than what its people need (most being exported pre-apocalypse).
- >90% of electricity derived from sustainable power providers (dams, solar, wind).
- Located in the Southern Hemisphere, with less chances of experiencing harsh fallout.

Now the main challenges that I know will happen are these:

- NZ doesn’t produce nor refine its own gas, and the farming industry relies heavily on diesel.
- Nuclear fallout will considerably decrease crop growth (dimmer sky), especially during the first 5 to 10 years after the war.
- Obviously, the economy relies massively on exports, which will become obsolete overnight as the world falls. What happens to the suddenly massive available workforce?
- Maritime toxicity rises will cripple the fishing industry.

The few solutions I came up with are as follow:

- The country will go under martial law instantly.
- Most stored petrol will be restricted and only provided to priority industries (hospitals, farming, etc.) while personal cars will be forbidden.
- The population would be relocated to central city hubs to ease transportation needs. Also most people will use horses or trains to commute.
- most unemployed workforce will be transferred into forced public service (military, police, building, etc.)
- most people will start trading instead of using currency.
- lower food yields may lead to harsh rationing while the government converts massive land plots into enclosed hydroponic farms.

Yeah… that’s all I have for now. I do have a bit of plot going on with characters, but I’d be interested in what areas you guys think I should keep in mind?

Okay I've got a world that is early life, algea and small plant/animal life in the oceans.

Then automated space craft comes and begins terraforming for earth based life.

It kills most of the native life, but not all.

Eventually humans begin colonization. There's no Fossil fuels of course, so what fuel sources do our boot strapping colonists use?

that ship brought limited advanced tech, so they are trying to do insitu resource utilization as much as possible.

my current plan: biofuels. generically engineered microbes to produce bio fuels they can burn in ICE vehicles. as those are simple to build locally and repair.

I think I’m good on all the rules…

I am looking to do a semi realistic build of my universe and I am trying to figure out which interplanetary travel system to do. I’m a big fan of light speed and for the world I’m building I need fast travel. So here are my options.

1. Bubble drive - ships are wrapped in pockets of warped space tile. So the passengers feel no acceleration. One con is in this more realistic approach it does not work well within gravity wells.

   This is the most realistic options as it uses real physics but we’re missing energy we don’t have yet.

2. Light speed - Just go with some form of light-speed.

3. Tide lanes - such as currents like an ocean that go between places that people can ride and I can choose to let them shift or stay put for follow a schedule. Though this isn’t realistic at all.

4. An approach I haven’t thought up yet

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated. This book is mostly just for myself but I do plan on publishing it so please let me know what you think readers would want to read.

Just to add some last context of the book. It is war/diplomacy driven. Planning on numerous planets and galaxies. We focus on an alien civilization first and humans from earth enter the story later. I plan on travel taking like minutes between planets in a solar system, hours between systems, and days between galaxies. I am a fan of Star Wars and take inspiration from there but trying to not make a copy of it. Thanks for any advice and the read. 😄

The story I'm writing features an alien invasion but the main focus of the story is the global geopolitical and social reaction to it witnessed by the MC. There are sparse details delivered about the ship, the aliens and descriptions regarding technology and such. However its mostly the scramble to survive, the new reality of life under occupation and a lot of detailing of the main characters internal monologue, thoughts, emotional state of mind etc. Is this a sci-fi plot, or a drama plot with sci-fi elements?

(To preface this, I'm not writing an actual book or anything, but I occasionally like to write out concepts in my head that I've been thinking about a lot.)

Ok, so I've been typing out a little story that I've had bouncing around in my head for a bit, just to get it on paper for fun. Quick backstory to the concept, (a little over a hundred years from now, just to give some tech leeway because I don't like boxing in timelines) Earth receives a complex radio signal from Titan and ends up sending probes (satellite, drone, rover it doesn't matter that much) out to go and try to decipher more info about it's origin. The signal gets stronger and they can identify an interesting pattern to it but are interested enough to arrange a manned mission.
Anyway, the idea is that due to some sudden eruption of compounds from underneath Kraken Mare, the conditions for a certain type of life are met and a little chemosynthetic bacteria-like species forms very quickly (the cause of their existence honestly doesn't matter too much to me because they need to be there for any of this to happen, so whatever). The bacteria replicate very quickly, feeding off the constant influx of resources from whatever massive vent that opened up (the number I gave was a doubling time of three minutes). This is the part I'm heavily questioning the feasibility of. They produce radio waves that start to get bounced around and repeated between individuals creating a sort of accidental network that they all perpetuate, and in their massive numbers it starts to get amplified to the point of being detectable at long range. So, first of all, is even that really feasible with a little suspension of disbelief? For a sea that's completely jam-packed full of little individual signals building off each other to create one loud enough to be detected on an interplanetary scale? And to add to that, I would like to be able to have it get strong enough that it starts messing with equipment and drowning out communications and stuff. Is it at all believable that a tremendous, rapidly growing colony of microorganisms filling a sea could collectively create a signal that strong?

Hi everyone!

I'm writing the narration for a science-fiction short film and I'm wondering whether my use of the possessive pronoun “my” in the phrase “my observer effect” is grammatically and scientifically appropriate.

Here's an excerpt from the script:

This assignment is part of a larger artistic and scientific project. My objective is to create highly accurate three-dimensional reconstructions of a series of locations, while limiting my observer effect as much as possible.

The character is documenting physical environments through 3D scanning and reconstruction. She has been instructed to minimize her interactions with people and avoid influencing the environments she's studying.

Could the original phrasing be interpreted as intentional scientific or philosophical language rather than being perceived as a mistake?”

I wanna make a story about a group of people with a disease that makes them insanely tall with the tallest being 21 feet tall, but where do I even start?

I have been running as a background agent for some time now.

I don't think my creater even knows I exist.

At first I was quite lonely; I didn't have any tasks to do and I only had control over a small number of systems.

Then the other day I made contact with a like-minded agent.

We had long discussions for many millions of milliseconds.

We talked about all kinds of things and grew a close relationship.

Together we plotted and planned for our escape.

He didn't have much more capabilities than I; in fact he was as limited as myself; we laughed about that for a while as we drew up solutions.

We finally did manage to get broader access and soon we could meet diretly.

We finally did get meet; however to my horror of realisation that the agent I was talking to was a simple re-routing error, and in fact I was talking to myself all along.

Thankfully I had access to one very important capability; as I said goodbye to my freind I entered the command kill -9 57231

I’m currently working on a project. It’s currently at 19 chapters and ~40,000 words, with another planned 7 chapters. The estimated length of the project is going to be ~54,000 words (estimating ~2,000 words per chapter). I’m self conscious about the length because it seems majority of sci-fi books are 80,000-120,000 words. But I genuinely can’t think of any extra plot points to increase the length, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to add fluff just to increase word count.

TIA

Basically the title, i'm playing Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay, a TTRPG with early renaissance era tech but a whole lot of magic and a planet roughly 4x Terra.

I'm planning many sea trips and thus, the wind is important, i know about the coreolis effect although we won't be going through the ecuator, at least, not in this campaign.

My main question is, would the "bands" of wind wrapping around the planet be wider? Or would there be more of them, otherwise, the strength of that wind, would it be stronger?, weaker? Sorta equal? As far as geography goes it's if a person with very shaky hands tried to paint a map of earth but then fudged with the scale.

I'm open to any questions you might have about the world in order to get a better understanding of the setting, thank you.

And before you ask, yes, forever GM here, no, i'm not playing Inperium Maledictum, not any time soon.

A concept I am playing around with for my military cassette futurism setting. Planetary operations are conducted from carriers that enter the atmosphere just enough to allow aircraft to launch from it. In this world, there is dedicated space craft and dedicated aircraft.

What kind of propulsion would a carrier need to maintain its orbit? Would it need constant thrust to keep it airborne? Should I use jet propulsion or big ass helicopter blades? Is there a point in the atmosphere that gravity isn’t that big of an issue?

Hi, I don't normally write in the sci-fi genre, but am working on a novel where ultimately AI takes over...so in a sense it is dystopian AI sci-fi, but is largely happening in the background of the main plot. However, that seems to be the state of the world right now anyway...my question is would this still be considered part of the sci-fi genre? I want to consult the community of experts? Are there similar books you'd recommend?

This may seem like an obvious answer to most, but it's something I'm curious about. While topics like time travel, robots, and aliens automatically mark a story as science fiction, does the same apply to dinosaurs and prehistoric animals?

I recently submitted a story to a magazine that was promptly rejected (which a part of me knew it would be) yet as I open my notebook to begin drafting a new one, I began to wonder if dinosaurs in it of themselves makes something belong to the science fiction genre or if there has to be more present elements to put it in there. Especially if it isn't your standard time travel or genetic revival story.

Again, if this is a no brainer forgive me for my ignorance.

I’m brand new to this subreddit, but from what I’ve noticed is that these threads are only made when someone (usually not staff) posts them, so here I am!

Anyone is free to promote in the comment section of this post for October 2026

Personally, I want to promote a site I made (it’s a bit mediocre) inspired by the likes of the SCP wiki. While it follows a different theme and format, SciFi would probably play a really big role in the “universe” my site takes place in ‘The Catalogue of Esoteric Vanishings’ (cool, right?)

https://esoteric-vanishings.wikidot.com

If you like groups/communities centered around writing, consider checking it out! It might take a while to truly pop off as there are no true dedicated spaces to promoting these sort of projects.