ITT: Original Story Ideas

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Aliens abduct the entire continental united states (including the land itself, leaving only ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). Our story follows expats dealing with their complicated feelings about this, as in the background other nations vie for power under the guise of attempting to deal with the catastrophic natural disasters resulting from a sudden huge physical void on the earth.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Two ideas:

*The question of whether it is qualitatively different to nuke an area vs to destroy an equal area with a lot of smaller bombs explored through a conflation of the biblical conflicts between Israel and Moab and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes". With the faction corresponding to Israel worshipping a single nuclear bomb, and the pagan faction worshipping several high yield conventional bombs. Basically the whole thing is a "Moab" pun.

*Parody of "Charlie & the Chocolate Factory" in which a Vladimir Putin expy runs some sort of shady business staffed by bright orange "Trumpa Lumpas"

[minuspace]

Evil genius taps DeRPA to fund R&D for new rehabilitative neural implant technology. He thinks they will not see how trivial it will be for him to subsequently reverse the implants function, to make its users serve him, world dominion etc. DeRPA sure didn't really never see it coming, because evil-genius was actually patient zero of said experiment.  Making him believe he-himself had invented the technology was "proof of concept".

[tyrannosaurus vex]

In the near but not too-near future, advancements in AI and robotics have rendered all jobs obsolete while solving global food, energy, and housing shortages. However, due to some very heated debates during this time of great progress, one of the automation systems' most sacred directives is that some labor must be preserved for humans, because "a person is nothing without work". Because of this, the AI has created an entire economy based on completely useless labor. Some people produce little plastic widgets, other people transport them, others deliver them, and others dispose of them in recycling centers so the process can continue. Anyone who shirks their responsibility is punished with the withholding of some luxury goods.

There are no distinct characters in this story. It just keeps going like that, forever.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

In the near but not too-near future, advancements in AI and robotics have rendered all jobs obsolete while solving global food, energy, and housing shortages. However, due to some very heated debates during this time of great progress, one of the automation systems' most sacred directives is that some labor must be preserved for humans, because "a person is nothing without work". Because of this, the AI has created an entire economy based on completely useless labor. Some people produce little plastic widgets, other people transport them, others deliver them, and others dispose of them in recycling centers so the process can continue. Anyone who shirks their responsibility is punished with the withholding of some luxury goods.

There are no distinct characters in this story. It just keeps going like that, forever.

This has actually been done.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

In the near but not too-near future, advancements in AI and robotics have rendered all jobs obsolete while solving global food, energy, and housing shortages. However, due to some very heated debates during this time of great progress, one of the automation systems' most sacred directives is that some labor must be preserved for humans, because "a person is nothing without work". Because of this, the AI has created an entire economy based on completely useless labor. Some people produce little plastic widgets, other people transport them, others deliver them, and others dispose of them in recycling centers so the process can continue. Anyone who shirks their responsibility is punished with the withholding of some luxury goods.

There are no distinct characters in this story. It just keeps going like that, forever.

This has actually been done.

where? i must have it.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

I think it was in Kino's Journey

EDIT:
Also, wasn't there also a vignette like this in Let's Visit the World of the Future?

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Two more ideas

*An unofficial "Flatland" sequel exploring what things would be like if there were a second dimension of time.

*A musical based on the Hellraiser movie series. ♪"Oh There's a secret song at the center of the world, and its sound is like razors through flesh."♪

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A space opera narrated by a ship's engineer whose engineering degree is fraudulent. The technobabble doesn't make sense because the character speaking it knows nothing about engineering, and the drama comes from the generally poor upkeep job being done.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Shortly after the release of the first generation ships, advances in life-extension technology result in a second batch wherein the first generation of inhabitants could live long enough to still be healthy upon arrival -- so long as they can stay sane for the whole trip. The third batch of generation ships introduced the first coldsleep tech. Around the time of scheduled arrival, the tech to open up a one-way wormhole to the destination was invented (although it wouldn't be possible to get enough energy for a wormhole going in the opposite direction for another fifty years). So, all four groups make landfall at about the same time, with vastly different cultures: the first batch have short lives and are obsessed with conservation and with ensuring a good life for their children; the second batch, being nearly immortal, have spent a thousand years trying to assuage their boredom and tend toward the eccentric, having an obsession with keeping entertained by any means necessary; the third batch and the fourth are snapshots of earth culture taken a thousand years apart. Intelligent representatives of each culture form a colonial council to try to prevent war and solve problems peacefully, but they have a hard task ahead of them: the colonies are trying to self-segregate despite limited space and limited resources making it important that they live in close proximity.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A drug is developed that has two primary effects: 1) psychic powers, and 2) a profound feeling of unity with the universe and alignment between one's own life path and the universe's master plan. This drug becomes very popular on the black market as a research chemical -- after all, many people wish they had fantastic abilities, and everybody likes being assured that they've made good decisions. However, because of the precise nature of the confidence induced -- a confidence in the correctness of one's past decisions, regardless of their nature -- the drug produces a perpetual state of war: among heavy users of the drug (most of whom are trying to escape past trauma) momentary impulses are enabled by the drug, executed with the help of the drug, and justified by the drug, including destructive impulses.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Some sci-fi ideas

*Sort of a more serious, harder sci-fi version of the premise of Futurama. The story of the employees of an interstellar courier service. The successful construction of an alcubierre drive has made transport ships the fastest form of interplanetary communication. The drive is dangerous and expensive due to using absurdly high energy pulses of squeezed light as its negative energy density source. The ephemeral nature of this method means that artificial wormholes are not practical and that the ship must advance in a rapid series of hops.
The alcubierre ships are unfavored however for many types of/reasons for passenger travel because they take significantly longer to reach their destination from the perspective of passengers than a conventional ship traveling at near light speed

*a slightly softer sci-fi about the creation (for whatever reason) of a non-rotatable object by using some kind of perfectly rigid unobtanium to create very very very long bars extending in all three directions of length such that any rotation would require infinite energy due to relativistic effects of the mass of the endpoints

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A warrior sect has anot initiation ritual where they see a vision of their own death, then take an oath never tof speak of it. The sect is known for bravery & risk taking: they are willing to put themselves in danger in situations that don't look like they will lead to the envisioned death. It doesn't matter much that the visions have little to do with how people actually die: nobody notices, because they kept their visions secret during life.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Subtly satirical skit about a professor giving a lecture about how vision works by an image being formed by the retina, passed by the retina to the optic nerve as nerve impulses, passed from the optic nerve to the visual cortex for processing and interpretation, and then passed to the rest of the brain - while at the same time deriding homonculus arguments, without realising that the valid explanation he just gave is isomorphic to a homonculus argument regressed three times (unless of course we take the homonculus argument as totally literal, but that would obviously be a strawman (I hope. I mean you'd have to be pretty demented to take that literally or even semi-literally (unless the wikipedia article is just very poorly explained, to the point of the introduction being completely different from/unrelated to the concept it's trying to explain)))

[minuspace]

Animaniacs mime the explanatory gap in the hard problem of consciousness.