What is a premise?

12 premises in the vocabulary

• What if machines could think?

  A story built on the hypothesis that an artificial mind attains consciousness, intelligence, or personhood.

  7 works

• What if we could travel through time?

  A premise in which the ability to move through time — forward, back, or sideways — reshapes what is possible and what is at stake.

  11 works

• What if we met an alien intelligence?

  A story founded on humanity's first encounter with a non-human intelligence and the effort to understand it.

  13 works

• What if we could create life?

  A premise in which human beings synthesize, engineer, or reanimate living things and must face the consequences.

  4 works

• What if reality were a simulation?

  A story built on the possibility that the world the characters inhabit is an artificial construct or illusion.

  8 works

• What if we could live forever?

  A premise exploring the pursuit or achievement of immortality and its personal and social consequences.

  2 works

• What if civilization collapsed?

  A story premised on the breakdown of society by disaster, plague, war, or environmental catastrophe, and survival after it.

  10 works

• What if we could edit the mind?

  A premise in which memory, personality, or perception can be implanted, erased, or engineered.

  8 works

• What if the state controlled everything?

  A premise imagining a society in which a total authority governs thought, behavior, reproduction, or history.

  8 works

• What if we could engineer humanity?

  A story built on the deliberate genetic or biological redesign of human beings and its social stratifications.

  6 works

• What if we settled other worlds?

  A premise centered on the colonization, terraforming, or settlement of planets beyond Earth.

  6 works

• What if history had gone differently?

  An alternate-history premise that changes a pivotal past event and follows the world that results.

  4 works