May Theme Prompt: Many Minds

Write a sci-fi story about the mind.

Of course, you'll use your mind to write the story (I hope). But that's not what I mean. That abstract, illusive thinking construct we call mind should play an important role in your story.

About this prompt

For this theme prompt, we ask you to write an imaginative and evocative science fiction story using any topic and sub-genre you choose. Your story must feature an examination or treatment of the concept of mind. It can be your mind, my mind, our minds, or a completely alien mind that works differently from ours.

Note that mind is not the same as brain. The latter is the host system, the wetware that runs the thoughtgrams, so to speak. According to Wikipedia:

The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes [...] and unconscious processes [...].

Psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have proposed and thought about many different theories of the mind and its thoughts -- what Einstein might have called "Gedankenexperiment über Gedanken." But, frankly, none of them have made much progress in defining or locating the thing. We are relatively certain it's somewhere between chin and cowlick, but we can't be more specific than that.

One interesting epistemological conjecture, called solipsism, that's gotten a lot of attention sounds outlandish enough to be a sci-fi premise. Solipsists consider the possibility that there is only one mind. Anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. I'm not sure anyone actually believes this, though I know of some folks who behave as if it's true. The theory can't really be disproved, which makes it an interesting starting point for philosophical discussions about how we might think.

Rules

The rules for the theme prompt are as follows:

• Entries should be submitted in the usual way using the Write for Us submissions link.

• Mention the title of the prompt (Many Minds) in the Notes field of the submissions form.

• Submissions must be received by June 15, 2025 to qualify.

• Entries must comply with all the usual SFS Guidelines.

• Your work can be horror, romance, dystopian, alien, or whatever, as long as it’s Sci-Fi and addresses the prompt's theme.

• Submit only one story for this prompt.

• You may continue to submit stories to SFS that are outside the contest, and we encourage you to do so.

If you have more than one story that fits the theme, please submit your best one for the prompt and send us the others as non-theme entries. Also, if the editors feel your theme entry is good enough to publish but does not satisfy the theme requirements, we reserve the right to accept it as a non-theme submission.

After the prompt has ended and all the entries have been processed, we will list and link to the participating stories in a blog post. The editorial staff will choose one story for special mention as the Editors' Choice.

Exemplars

There are quite a few different categories of sci-fi stories about the mind: mind control, mental deficiencies, exceptional minds, artificial minds, multiple personalities/identities, telepathy, mind reading, etc. One of my favorite mind-related short stories is Flowers for Algernon, originally published in 1958 by Daniel Keyes, which he later expanded into the novel and screenplay titled Charly. Keyes also wrote a second mind-related nonfiction novel in 1981: the (mostly) true story of a man with twenty-four minds within his head, one of whom had committed a major crime. The Minds of Billy Milligan reads like science fiction as it describes how one of Milligan's multiple minds committed a serious felony and the other twenty-three were eventually acquitted of the crimes in a court of law!

Here are some other links to vintage short stories where mind plays a major role:

• Harrison Bergeron — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1961. Vonnegut uses his signature absurdism to take anti-intellectualism and anti-exceptionism to their logical conclusion. Exceptional intellects shall not be tolerated!

• The Key (page 200) — Isaac Asimov, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1966. This somewhat rambling novelette is about a mysterious mind-reading device uncovered on the moon by an incurable punster. The antagonist is a member of a group of revolutionaries called the Ultras, who favor targeted genocide to reduce the disastrous overpopulation of Earth, as it was viewed in 1966. The population then was 6.4 billion. Today, in 2025, it is 8.2 billion.

• Multiples — Robert Silverberg, Omni, October 1983. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a real thing. It's rare, but it happens. This extremely well-written "bar story" is almost like a combination of the two Keyes books mentioned above. And it makes DID sound like great fun!

"I don't find the mind a boring subject," she said. "I don't find real estate a boring subject. Talk to me about second mortgages and triple-net leases." "Talk to me about Chomsky and Benjamin Whorf."

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So, this month, use your amazing mind to write a fascinating story about minds. I know there's one in there because...

I can read your mind.