Short Story Example: Science Fiction. A Complete Story Built on One Idea
Quick answer: An original science fiction short story about a forty-minute signal delay between Jupiter and Earth, with a breakdown of how one constraint drives the whole plot.
Short science fiction works best with one idea, taken seriously, and a person whose ordinary life that idea makes difficult. The original story below has no aliens and no war. Its single idea is the one-way signal delay between a station near Jupiter and a hospital on Earth, and its plot is a daughter trying to say the right thing to her mother across forty minutes of light. The breakdown afterwards shows how the constraint creates every beat.
Light Time
Ines Carvalho had explained the delay to her mother eleven times and her mother still ended every message with 'Reply when you get this,' as though Ines might be screening her calls from four hundred million miles away. Forty-one minutes today, one way. The station was on the far side of its orbit and the numbers on the comms board were the worst they got. Her mother's surgery was at 14.00 Lisbon time. It was 13.10. Ines had the message window open and a cup of coffee tethered to the desk by its lid because the station's spin gave you enough gravity to sit but not enough to trust. Whatever she said now would arrive at 13.55, when her mother would be on a trolley with a cannula in the back of her hand, and anything her mother said back would arrive after 14.00, from a woman already under. There was no version of this in which they spoke to each other. There was only a version in which Ines said something into the dark and it arrived, or did not, in time. She had written four drafts. The first was too long. The second told her mother she loved her in a way that sounded like a will. The third was jokes. She deleted the fourth without reading it. At 13.14 she pressed record and said, 'Mãe. It's me. You'll get this on the trolley, probably, so I'll be quick. I've worked out the timing. By the time you're waking up, I'll already have sent the next one, and it'll be waiting for you. So you don't have to reply to this. You just have to wake up and there'll be a message from me. That's how it works out here. I'm always talking to you before I know what's happened. Turns out I'm fine with that.' She sent it. Then she sat with the coffee and watched the board count down, and at 15.20 she pressed record again and began, 'Mãe, you're awake,' and made herself say it as though it were a fact, because in forty-one minutes it would have to be.
How one constraint drives the story
The delay is the plot. The story does not explain orbital mechanics; it explains what forty-one minutes does to a phone call, which is to make conversation impossible and leave only messages sent into uncertainty. Every beat follows from that. The four drafts are what anyone would write. The tethered coffee cup is the one piece of set dressing, and it is doing physics for the reader without a paragraph about spin gravity.
The turn is Ines understanding the delay differently: not as a barrier but as a structure that lets her be waiting for her mother on the other side of the anaesthetic. Her message is the story's argument, and the last sentence is its act of faith. She records 'You're awake' before she can know it, because the light-lag has made that the only honest way to love someone from Jupiter. The science and the feeling are the same thing, which is what good short science fiction does.
Writing your own
Pick one real constraint, a delay, a shortage, a rule of physics, and learn it well enough to get the numbers right. Then find the most ordinary human situation that constraint would wreck: a phone call, a birthday, a goodbye. Let your character use the constraint rather than defeat it. Keep the world-building to the objects on the desk. Writory's short story contest has no genre restriction, and science fiction that keeps its feet on the ground tends to score well on impact.
What writers can take from this
- One idea, one constraint, one person it inconveniences.
- Get the number right and put it in the first paragraph.
- Let a single object do the world-building: a tethered cup, a lag counter.
- Have the character use the constraint, not overcome it.
- End on an act of faith the science makes necessary.
Try it yourself
Write a science fiction story of under 700 words in which a communication delay, of any length, makes a conversation impossible at the one moment it matters. The character must find a way to say the thing anyway, using the delay rather than fighting it.
Questions
Does science fiction have to be scientifically accurate?
It has to be internally consistent, and it helps to be accurate about the one thing the story depends on. Light Time gets the light-lag right and invents nothing else. Readers forgive vagueness about propulsion; they do not forgive a delay that changes length to suit the plot.
What is the difference between hard and soft science fiction?
Hard science fiction treats the science as a constraint that cannot be waved away; soft science fiction uses futuristic settings to explore people and societies with looser rules. Light Time is hard in its single detail and soft everywhere else, which is a common and useful mix in short fiction.
How much world-building fits in a short story?
Almost none, by novel standards. Two or three concrete objects that behave differently from ours will establish a world faster than any paragraph of history. Trust the reader to infer the rest.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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