September Theme Prompt: Terrestrial Settings

Write a sci-fi story set in some unique or interesting place on or near Earth.

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A few days ago, I visited the famous Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, Spain. Unfortunately, it was under construction.

I'd been there once before, fifteen years ago. It was under construction then, too. In fact, it has been under construction almost continuously since work began there in 1882. For 143 years, almost nobody has seen it without a construction crane or two obstructing the view. The current projection calls for it to be "finished" by sometime next year, 2026. But I doubt it.

It's an impressive building-in-progress — one of the most visited sites in the world. But here's the thing: it makes me uncomfortable.

There was never really a plan for it. Antoni Gaudi, the Spanish architect who made it his life's project, had some notes and stuff, but they were destroyed in a fire shortly after his death. And so, today it appears, at least to me, to have no consistent style or message. Gaudi's vision was that it would become a grand Gothic cathedral with playful, Art Nouveau stylings. A new wing added since I saw it last looks to me like a commercial for Fruit-of-the-Loom.

And it's not a cathedral. It was first consecrated as a minor basilica in 2010. But they keep working on it, adding new façades, carving fanciful gargoyles and statuary.

It just keeps... growing.

All of which got me thinking about how a single building might sprawl over decades or centuries of construction into something with no consistent plan or purpose other than to shelter the "haves" within and impress the "have nots" outside its funky walls. What might this perpetual project called Sagrada Familia look like in, say, the year 2180? (See what MidJourney imagined in the image above.)

And more interestingly, what will they be doing in there?

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 be set in an interesting and inventive place on or near Earth: caverns, undersea, close orbit, silos, giant buildings, etc.

Remember that a good story is more than just the setting. If you submit a brilliant, vivid description of the most imaginative place on Earth, but there's no character or story arc, we will likely reject it with a NAS (Not a Story) note. Also, remember your story must be science fiction to avoid the dreaded NSF (Not Science Fiction) note from the editors.

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 (Terrestrial Settings) in the Notes field of the submissions form.

• Submissions must be received by October 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

Many of the most memorable early sci-fi stories were about adventures in terrestrial settings. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea spawned a bunch of undersea stories, and his Journey to the Center of the Earth likewise preceded underground exploration stories by many others. More recently, Hugh Howey's Silo series of novels explore a confined underground space in a post-apocalyptic plotline.

Here are some other vintage short stories that employ interesting terrestrial settings:

• The Machine Stops — E.M. Forster, The Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909. A year after publishing A Room with a View, an Edwardian romance, Forster took the next logical step (ahem) and wrote one of the first technological dystopian sci-fi stories. The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies similar to instant messaging and the Internet. It also presaged Howey's much later Silo series.

• The Fog Horn — Ray Bradbury, Saturday Evening Post, June 1951. This one leans a bit more toward fantasy than sci-fi. But hey, it's Bradbury so we cut him some slack.

• '—And He Built a Crooked House—' Robert A. Heinlein, Astounding Science Fiction. February 1941 Quintus Teal, an architect in the Los Angeles area, designs and builds a curious house. It's a 4-dimensional tesseract. I love that character name.

"What is a house?" Teal demanded of his friend, Homer Bailey. "Well—" Bailey admitted cautiously, "speaking in broad terms, I've always regarded a house as a gadget to keep off the rain." "Nuts! You're as bad as the rest of them." "I didn't say the definition was complete—" "Complete! It isn't even in the right direction.

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So this month, go somewhere truly interesting, perhaps unique. Tell us about the people who live or work there, and how they're affected by the locale in which they find themselves. Describe a place that will make us sit up and pay attention. And most importantly, tell us...

What are they doing in there?