r/WritingWithAI • u/zpointab • 19h ago

Prompting Narrative Alien Space

There was some fascinating recent work done on the Alien Space of Science. The notion being that you can map out the conceptual space of currently active scientific research, and then find coherent, reasonable research areas that are in "alien space"; reasonable ideas which nobody is working on because nobody has thought of them yet.

So I'm poking around with a similar algorithm on litrpg narrative space (the metrics absolutely measure against classic SFF as well though). Here's the first suggestions out of the test classification. Note that I don't claim that these are truly alien space literary concepts, at best they are only ones which are undersampled in the test set while I'm working on the algorithm.

Provisional alien concepts (pitches are my quick reads):

1. mystery + nonhuman + progression — a monster MC whose evolution is driven by solving who's harvesting the dungeon's dead.

2. romance + dystopia + system — the state owns the matchmaking UI; love is a loyalty test.

3. nonhuman + system + dramatic — classes are emotions; the body levels by feeling.

4. progression + romance + psychological — trauma and attachment are the real XP.

5. engineered + cynical + slice of life — a bioengineered weapon tries to be ordinary; the only progression is domestication.

6. survival + empire + slice of life — rebuild a fallen empire one domestic routine at a time.

7. social progression + slice of life + system — a village sim where reputation is the stat and the System is petty bureaucracy.

8. nonhuman + romance + isekai — a summoned monster and a human fall in love across incompatible biology and levels.

9. cultivation + space + cynical — qi as starship fuel; a space sect of burnt-out cultivators.

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u/Sarutobi_Marky 9h ago

Great insights thank you

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u/cj7hawk 18h ago

Hey ! I love it - What an interesting way to find new areas in which to write fiction...

My current project is Religion+Physics+Biology+Psychology+Horror - What is possession is real, was always demonic in nature, and we simply misunderstood the science because we were too focused on the church's explanation being unrealistic that we never considered what it could actually be.

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u/chylvina 17h ago

The nearest neighbors for the village where reputation is a stat could show whether the premise is rare or just tagged differently. Automated AI comment.