# Science Fiction (Speculative Premise) Story Template

> Maliang Writer · Maliang Writer Team · 2026-11-13 · https://maliangwriter.com/en/guides/story-templates/science-fiction/

## Story outline

| Field | Your Story | Guidance |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Baseline world and premise pitch |  | Introduce the familiar starting setting and state the scientific hypothesis or speculative rule that challenges accepted reality. |
| Demonstration and prototype |  | Show an initial experiment, model, or small-scale test that demonstrates the speculative concept works in physical terms. |
| Crossing into the speculative world |  | Describe how the protagonist activates the mechanism or crosses the threshold into the altered era or environment. |
| First contact and initial hypothesis |  | Capture the protagonist's first encounter with the changed world and the early scientific or social theory formed to explain it. |
| Loss of control or stranding |  | Introduce the complication that cuts off easy retreat or forces the protagonist to survive inside the speculative conditions. |
| Anomalies and deeper investigation |  | Plant physical clues and behavioral contradictions that undermine the initial hypothesis and demand closer inquiry. |
| Core speculative revelation |  | Reveal the underlying mechanism or hidden relationship that governs the speculative society or phenomenon. |
| Escalating survival crisis |  | Force the protagonist to use salvaged tools and scientific reasoning against the direct hazards of the speculative world. |
| Climax and further extrapolation |  | Resolve the struggle over the speculative mechanism and push the premise forward to show its broader long-term consequences. |
| Return and unresolved aftermath |  | Bring the narrative back to the baseline frame, showing what physical traces remain and what questions stay open. |

## Main character profile

| Field | Your Story | Guidance |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Name or narrative title |  | Give the protagonist's name or functional title, noting if a role-based designation centers their scientific function in the story. |
| Scientific and technical background |  | List the protagonist's areas of study, engineering skills, or experimental habits that make engaging with the premise credible. |
| Driving curiosity and goal |  | State what intellectual question, ambition, or practical need pushes the protagonist to pursue the speculative premise. |
| Era-bound assumptions and blind spots |  | Identify the baseline expectations from the protagonist's own culture or era that cause misjudgments in the speculative setting. |
| Physical traits and stamina |  | Describe the protagonist's physical build, age, and bodily limits when tested against unfamiliar environments. |
| Temperament under stress |  | Explain how the protagonist handles isolation, shock, and uncertainty when familiar rules no longer apply. |
| Tactical improvisation |  | Detail how the protagonist adapts available materials, natural laws, or remnants of technology to solve crises. |
| Key relationship in the speculative setting |  | Describe the bond that tests or grounds the protagonist's humanity amid unfamiliar social or biological conditions. |
| Philosophical arc |  | Summarize how experiencing the speculative premise alters or confirms the protagonist's view of human progress. |

## World and setting sheet

| Field | Your Story | Guidance |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Baseline era and anchor location |  | Specify the starting time period, social circle, and physical site that contrast with the speculative setting. |
| Speculative technology and physical rules |  | Explain how the central device or phenomenon operates, what controls it, and what physical risks or limits apply. |
| Geography and built environment |  | Describe how terrain, climate, architecture, and infrastructure reflect long-term exposure to the speculative premise. |
| Biological and ecological shifts |  | Detail how human biology, animal life, plant species, and disease have changed under speculative pressures. |
| Social and economic order |  | Outline how resources, labor, living arrangements, and power relations function both visibly and behind the scenes. |
| Language, memory, and culture |  | Show what has survived, simplified, or disappeared in speech, literacy, science, and art. |
| Environmental hazards and vulnerabilities |  | Identify the recurring natural cycles, predators, or physical conditions that threaten survival in this world. |
| Planetary and cosmic trajectory |  | Describe the long-range astronomical or geological changes that frame the setting's distant future. |

## Breakdown Example: The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)

> This breakdown uses a public-domain book, with quotes from the original text.

### Story outline

| Field | In the Book |
| --- | --- |
| Baseline world and premise pitch | At an after-dinner gathering in his Richmond home, the Time Traveller argues to his skeptical guests that Time functions as a fourth dimension alongside the three dimensions of Space. He proposes that human consciousness drifts along this dimension and suggests that a machine could travel forward or backward in Time. — “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.” |
| Demonstration and prototype | The Time Traveller places a small clock-sized metallic model on an octagonal table and guides the Psychologist's finger to press its lever, causing the apparatus to vanish before the witnesses. Afterward, he leads his doubtful guests to his laboratory to inspect the nearly completed full-scale machine. — “One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished!” |
| Crossing into the speculative world | Once a remade nickel bar finishes the full-sized machine, the Time Traveller takes his seat in the saddle and pushes the starting lever over. He accelerates past flickering days, shifting buildings, and changing seasons until he pulls the lever to stop and tumbles onto a hail-swept lawn in the year 802,701 A.D. — “Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.” |
| First contact and initial hypothesis | Greeted by the gentle, diminutive, fruit-eating Eloi amid decaying palaces and garden-like scenery, the Time Traveller pockets his machine's control levers and surveys the Thames valley from a hillcrest. He initially concludes that humanity subdued nature and disease so effectively that safety and comfort caused intelligence and vigor to decline. — “Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” |
| Loss of control or stranding | Returning at nightfall to the lawn by the White Sphinx, the Time Traveller discovers that his Time Machine has been taken away. In the morning light, he traces a groove in the turf and narrow footprints to the hollow bronze pedestal of the sphinx, inferring that the machine is locked inside. — “It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside that pedestal.” |
| Anomalies and deeper investigation | While learning basic speech and befriending an Eloi named Weena, the Time Traveller notices deep air-sucking wells, tall ventilating towers, the Eloi's dread of darkness, and the absence of surface workshops despite their maintained clothing and sandals. After sighting pale, nocturnal creatures in the ruins, he deduces that humanity diverged into two species and climbs down a well shaft to examine the subterranean world. — “But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.” |
| Core speculative revelation | Inside the dark underground cavern, the Time Traveller fends off grasping Morlocks after spotting large machines and a joint of meat on a metal table. Connecting this discovery with the extinction of past livestock and the Eloi's terror of moonless nights, he concludes that the old class order has inverted and the Morlocks maintain and prey upon the Eloi as food. — “These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to the breeding of.” |
| Escalating survival crisis | Seeking shelter and weapons, the Time Traveller hikes with Weena to the ruined museum of the Palace of Green Porcelain, where he snaps off an iron machine lever for a mace and finds sealed matches and camphor. During their night return through a forest, Morlocks surround them in the dark, steal his matchbox while he dozes, and leave Weena lost as the brushfire he lit earlier sweeps through the woods. — “Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blundering hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment.” |
| Climax and further extrapolation | Finding the bronze doors of the White Sphinx open as a trap, the Time Traveller steps inside, fights off ambushing Morlocks in the dark when his loose safety matches fail without a box, attaches his levers, and launches forward in time. Passing more than thirty million years ahead, he observes a tidally locked Earth beneath a huge dull-red sun, inhabited first by giant predatory crabs and later by a tentacled creature beside an icy sea during an eclipse. — “At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.” |
| Return and unresolved aftermath | The Time Traveller reverses his motion, returns injured and exhausted to his Richmond laboratory on the same evening he departed, and tells his story to his skeptical dinner guests, showing them the battered machine and two strange white flowers from Weena. The next day he embarks again with a camera and knapsack to bring back specimens, vanishing from his laboratory and not returning in the three years since. — “The Time Traveller vanished three years ago.” |

### Main character profile

| Field | In the Book |
| --- | --- |
| Name or narrative title | The narrator leaves the protagonist unnamed and refers to him throughout the account as the Time Traveller. During his return into the laboratory, the Time Traveller briefly mentions catching sight of Hillyer, though the text does not specify whether Hillyer is a household member, an assistant, or someone else. — “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” |
| Scientific and technical background | He is an inventor and researcher who holds patents on household chairs, builds delicate mechanisms of brass, nickel, ivory, and crystal in his workshop, and has published seventeen papers on physical optics in the Philosophical Transactions. During his voyage, he also draws on four-dimensional geometry, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and paleontology to interpret what he sees. — “At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.” |
| Driving curiosity and goal | He wants to test his four-dimensional geometry by experiment and observe how human society and biology develop in future ages. After the Morlocks hide his machine, his immediate aim becomes recovering it to return home, though once back in Richmond he departs again with a camera and knapsack to gather physical proof. — “What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilisation, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes!” |
| Era-bound assumptions and blind spots | Expecting the inhabitants of 802,701 A.D. to surpass nineteenth-century Britain in knowledge and tools, he departs without weapons, medicine, a camera, or spare matches, and wastes nearly half his matchbox amusing the Eloi. He also repeatedly constructs plausible sociological theories based on nineteenth-century ideas of progress and class hierarchy before evidence overturns them. — “When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.” |
| Physical traits and stamina | He has grey eyes, a usually pale face, and a broad head, and remarks that he is not a young man, yet he exceeds the four-foot-tall descendants of humanity in size, strength, and endurance. Over eight days he walks eighteen miles with a loose nail piercing his shoe, climbs down and up a two-hundred-yard well shaft, and fights off groups of Morlocks, returning lame, scarred, and starving. — “His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.” |
| Temperament under stress | Though capable of working on a scientific problem for years, he admits he is too restless for passive waiting, swinging from frantic despair on the night his machine disappears to calm, methodical planning the next morning. Among his friends in Richmond, a whimsical and reserved quality beneath his frankness makes listeners suspect trickery. — “I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.” |
| Tactical improvisation | Seeing the Eloi feel at his machine upon arrival, he promptly unscrews its operating levers and pockets them so the mechanism cannot be sent through time without them. Later, lacking nineteenth-century weapons, he snaps a metal lever off a museum machine for an iron mace and uses sealed museum camphor and matches to exploit the Morlocks' sensitivity to light. — “Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket.” |
| Key relationship in the speculative setting | After wading into the river to save the Eloi woman Weena from drowning while her companions ignore her cries, he earns her steady, childlike devotion. Although her fear and clinging sometimes complicate his explorations, her companionship eases his loneliness, reveals the Eloi's dread of the dark, and prompts his plan to bring her to his own time before she is lost in the forest fire. — “For, by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.” |
| Philosophical arc | Before the machine he optimistically expected humanity to triumph over Nature through education and co-operation. In the Eloi and Morlocks he finds that the "triumph" has produced a split, degenerate humanity, and his view is overturned. |

### World and setting sheet

| Field | In the Book |
| --- | --- |
| Baseline era and anchor location | The frame narrative takes place in a comfortable late-nineteenth-century house, smoking-room, and attached laboratory on a hillside in Richmond near London. There, professional men—including a Psychologist, a Medical Man, a Provincial Mayor, an Editor, a Journalist, Filby, and the narrator—meet on Thursday evenings for dinner and conversation. — “The next Thursday I went again to Richmond—I suppose I was one of the Time Traveller’s most constant guests—and, arriving late, found four or five men already assembled in his drawing-room.” |
| Speculative technology and physical rules | The Time Machine is a saddle-mounted framework of brass, ebony, nickel, ivory, and quartz or rock-crystal bars, controlled by two detachable white levers for forward and backward travel and four dials recording days up to thousands of millions. Rapid travel dilutes the machine's physical presentation below human perception while keeping it in the same spatial area on Earth, though stopping abruptly inside a solid obstacle risks a violent chemical explosion. — “If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time.” |
| Geography and built environment | In 802,701 A.D., the Thames has shifted about a mile in its valley, an estuary covers where Wandsworth and Battersea once stood, and a hotter climate supports lush, weedless garden growth without hedges or farm plots. Colossal, decaying buildings of stone, granite, aluminium, and green porcelain stand near statues like the White Sphinx, while bronze-rimmed wells and tall heat-flickering towers ventilate deep underground caverns. — “There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.” |
| Biological and ecological shifts | Humanity has split into two distinct species: the surface-dwelling Eloi, who are frail, four-foot-tall frugivores with uniform curly hair and minimal sexual differentiation, and the subterranean Morlocks, who are pale, chinless carnivores with large, light-sensitive greyish-red eyes. Familiar mammals such as horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs are extinct, gnats and contagious diseases have vanished, and the reduction of bacteria and fungi has slowed decay. — “Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.” |
| Social and economic order | Private houses, shops, commerce, and visible surface labor have disappeared; the Eloi eat fruit at communal stone tables and sleep in droves inside great halls. Underground, the Morlocks operate dark mechanical caverns that still supply the Eloi with garments and sandals out of ancient habit, while keeping and hunting the surface dwellers as a source of meat. — “And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.” |
| Language, memory, and culture | The Eloi speak a soft, liquid tongue largely limited to two-word sentences of concrete nouns and verbs with few abstract concepts, while the Morlocks use a different language below ground. Reading, writing, fire-making, and historical records have vanished—leaving museum books rotted into rags and inscriptions unreadable—while Eloi artistic expression is reduced to flower garlands, dancing, and song. — “Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively simple—almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs.” |
| Environmental hazards and vulnerabilities | In 802,701 A.D., darkness poses the chief danger, especially during the waning and new moon ('Dark Nights'), when nocturnal Morlocks climb up well shafts to hunt anyone unprotected by light or fire. More than thirty million years hence, planetary conditions themselves become hazardous through rarefied air that hurts the lungs, bitter cold, snow, monstrous table-sized crabs, and total darkness during an eclipse. — “The moon was on the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness.” |
| Planetary and cosmic trajectory | By 802,701 A.D., forty precessional cycles of Earth's axis have passed and stellar drift has rearranged the constellations into unfamiliar patterns. More than thirty million years in the future, tidal drag has brought Earth to rest with one face turned toward a huge, dull-red sun, the moon has vanished, an inner planet transits near Earth, and life by the salt-crusted sea has dwindled to green lichenous slime and a hopping black tentacled creature. — “The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth.” |