If you’re a writer of science fiction novels and are looking for interesting tropes to add a unique dimension to in your story, we’ve included 21 science fiction tropes for you in this post.
Happy reading!
Alien Tropes
1. Aliens share advanced technology with humans.
The aliens in this trope are often kind aliens who want to help Earth evolve beyond their current technological state. Sometimes, the aliens share for purely altruistic reasons or to make a connection with humans (like in the film Contact). Other times, it is because they want to help humanity prevent their own destruction or some future dire event.
2. Aliens invade Earth
On the flip side, aliens can also be the main antagonist of a science-fiction story. This trope allows the story to focus more on how humanity overcomes their own prejudices and discrimination in the face of a common, external enemy.
3. Aliens crash landing on Earth.
For this trope, the aliens become a source of mystery. Where did they come from? Who are they? What do they want? While the crash-landed aliens aren’t the clear enemies, their presence is meant to highlight the ways humanity responds to the unknown.
4. Secret government agency trying to keep the world safe from aliens.
This trope is very ‘Men in Black’ or ‘X Files’ in that there is a secret agency devoted entirely to keeping aliens a secret from the rest of the world. They often work with secret aliens already on Earth to stop the planet from being invaded or destroyed.
5. Using alien genetics to enhance humanity.
This is more a mad scientist trope that specifically uses alien DNA. The scientist splices the alien DNA with a human, and it goes bad, causing a monster to be created (like a modern-day Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). Or the new alien-human hybrid wants to raise an army to destroy unaltered humans. Or it is discovered that humans already had alien DNA from prehistoric times.
Time and Reality Tropes
6. Character travels back in time and changes the outcome of the future.
This is a common time travel trope that focuses on the ‘butterfly effect’: where making one tiny change in the past can cause massive changes for the future. This is the whole trope of Back to the Future: Marty McFly goes back to the past to make sure his parents meet so that he and his siblings can continue existing in the present.
7. Access to an identical parallel reality to our own is discovered.
For this trope, a character either purposefully or accidentally discovers a portal to an identical reality to our own. They interact with the ‘other’ versions of their own family and friends, navigating the differences to our own reality.
8. While discovering a wormhole, a character gets transported through time.
This trope pulls from the Bermuda Triangle superstition of disappearing vessels. A strange looking wormhole or time rip is discovered somewhere, and when the protagonist goes to investigate, they are sent through time. This could go to the past where they prevent some cataclysmic event from happening, or they could go to an alternate future, like in the original Planet of the Apes films.
9. To save the planet, people from the future come back to warn the present.
This trope can be mixed with other tropes depending on the reason for the future apocalypse. Terminator is a well-known film that uses this trope with Kyle Reese coming back to the 1980s to protect Sarah Connor so he can help humanity against the future robotic uprising.
10. Protagonist finds themselves in a time loop and must figure out how to break through it.
For this trope, the protagonist gets stuck repeating the same day or event over and over until they change the right thing to break the cycle. Groundhog Day with Bill Murray is probably the best-known film for this trope but others such as Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow also use this trope.
11. Multiple versions of a character must work together to stop the antagonist from destroying the universe.
For this parallel reality trope, the protagonist discovers there are multiple versions of themselves who come together to stop the universe from being destroyed. The antagonist in this trope is usually an evil, rogue version of themselves or someone close to them. Jet Li’s The One (2001) and Michelle Yuan’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2021) use this trope.
Space Travel Tropes
12. A group of astronauts can’t find their way home.
This ‘lost in space’ trope has the astronauts adrift in space with no idea how to get back on course or even back to where they came from. They must work together to resolve the issues that set them on this path.
13. Ship gets sucked through or towards a wormhole.
This trope can be time travel or horror, depending on what happens on the other side of the black hole. Interstellar mixes this with exploring the far reaches of space but also a bit of time travel, while Event Horizon adds horror by exploring what evil could come out of the black hole when we get close to it.
14. An abandoned space station is full of monsters.
A group of space travelers discover a space station, often because they are responding to a distress call. Once they’ve boarded the station, they must fight for their lives against the alien monsters that murdered the original crew.
15. The protagonist wakes up from cryosleep hundreds of light years from Earth.
This trope focuses on how humans would deal with knowing they could never return to Earth, either because they can’t return to cryosleep or because Earth has been destroyed during their cryosleep. They are forced to continue their travel, never to see ‘home’ again.
16. Astronauts must fight against space bandits.
While not often the main storyline, space pirate characters are a common trope to show how similar the universe is to Earth. The protagonist is often either kidnapped by the bandits or must fight against them to protect their property and crew.
Robot Tropes
17. Robots overcome their programming and attack humanity.
Because robots are shaped like humans but without the physical weaknesses of humans, we expect the worst. This trope imagines that the robots realize how much stronger they are and decide they don’t need or want humans around anymore.
18. Artificial intelligence becomes sentient and wants equal rights.
This trope is less ‘attack of the robots’ and more political and sociological. It begs questions about what makes someone worthy of ‘human rights’ and explores how we will treat artificial intelligence if it becomes more like humanity.
19. Robots as love interests.
What would the world be like if people could create their perfect partner from robots? This trope imagines what life would be like if people no longer needed to work at being a good romantic partner because they could just make one at a robot factory.
20. Robots become indistinguishable from humans.
For this trope, robots have advanced so far that they can pass the Turing Test, expressing the same range of emotion and affection that humans do.
21. Humans can become cyborgs or even just ‘ghosts in the shell’ of a robot body.
What if human consciousness could go beyond the physical body and become immortalized in a robot body? How would that change the way we think of ourselves as people and robots?