A running list of story premises I think of and will likely never write. Can't wait for AI authors that are actually good so I can feed these to them and read the output.
There's a guy I follow on YouTube who is kind of an off-grid nutty engineer type. He goes on rants about government conspiracies, how people should live off-grid like him, etc. He uses a ton of solar panels and upcycled motors from old scooters, etc. Very creative guy.
But he never considers that if everyone lived like him, the industrial base that makes what he's doing possible wouldn't exist. No solar panels, no microchips, no cheap motors, etc.
But this gave me a story idea: imagine a world with a highly-automated industrial base, with ultra-high worker productivity. Someone can work in industry for N years and make enough money to go off-grid for the rest of their lives.
So the normal societal lifecycle becomes: be born and raised in an Edenic off-grid paradise, then when you come of age, you go do N years (e.g. 5 years) as a sort of "tour of duty" in the highly-industrialized part of the world. Then you retire with your capital and raise the next generation in the off-grid Eden.
One theme would be the N years is slowly decreasing. Maybe your parents had to do 10 years. And if trends continue, your kids will only have to do 3 years. It's a topic of discussion what to do as this asymptotes.
Maybe, for example, some subset of men decide to do >N years to make themselves more attractive to a woman with the prospect of allowing her to do <N years.
Is the factory one place on Earth, or is the planet equally interspersed with industrial and non-industrial zones? Are there people that live in the industrial world their whole lives because they like it? Etc.
A story in the same style as pulpy detective noir fiction, but rather than being set in mid-century America, it's set in the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The protagonist "loose canon cop" character is a ronin who has to dive into the seedy ukiyo-e underworld.
Duels, brothels, ninja assassins, daimyo's daughter in distress romance, the whole thing. Just pure pulp in a fun setting.
Short story — one day it is revealed some small, random religion is the one true religion. Zoroastrianism or something. Ahura Mazda himself descends from the heavens and makes it clear that Zorastrianism is the real thing.
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Hinduism, etc — all false.
How does the world react to this news?
Speculative fiction in a world in which all cities are owned by corporations. To live in a city is to "subscribe" to it. You subscribe to Appleville or Googletopia or Samsung City, etc.
There is also a large swath of the world set aside to be anarchic for those who don't want to live in a corporate city, or those who no city will accept.
The story would be largely expositional on the world, similar to Ecotopia. Elements to touch on would be economics (each city-corp would probably have its own currency), political (how does governance work in each city?), and social.
I think of new stories a lot, I'll keep appending to this list.