Write Before Midnight
A Bulletin short fiction contest
See the winners in the January 2026 issue of the Bulletin's magazine.
The Bulletin’s mission—protecting civilization from manmade existential threats like nuclear weapons and climate change—is important. Filling civilization with art and the humanity it fosters is important, too.
Over the decades, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published the smartest minds in the fields it covers, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Mikhail Gorbachev, Arthur C. Clarke, Bertrand Russell, Freeman Dyson, George Shultz, Jerry Brown, Fiona Hill, Yoshua Bengio, and Jennifer Doudna, among many others.
But beyond its fact-based focus on science and security, the Bulletin has always had an affinity for and connection to the arts, high and low, from the artistic minimalism of the Doomsday Clock to the high satire of Dr. Strangelove and pop culture verve of The Who and Dr. Who. To mark the Bulletin’s 80th year of publication, we launched a short fiction contest called “Write Before Midnight," which was judged by acclaimed American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
Submitted stories could be about any of the existential threats the Bulletin covers: nuclear weapons, climate change, biological and chemical weapons, artificial intelligence, killer robots, doomsday drone submarines, bioengineered zombies, the gray goo of nanotechnology gone wild, and so, so much more. The stories could be dystopian or utopian; pre-, post-, or non-apocalyptic. They could be as optimistic as Sesame Street or as dark as Edgar Allan Poe’s basement. Entries could be of any genre: high literature and potboiler noir will vie on a level playing field; scifi, fantasy, spy, detective, horror, and even romance tales were just allowed, but celebrated. The tales could be comic, tragic, ironic, satiric, or any kind of -ic at all, and they could be of any length—up to 7,000 words. (And not a single word more.) The stories did, however, need to have some conceivable connection to the Bulletin’s interest in (avoiding) the Apocalypse.
You can read the winners of the contest in the 2026 January issue shared above.
Meet the judge, Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson will judge entries to "Write Before Midnight." He is an American science fiction writer. His most recent books are The Ministry for the Future and The High Sierra: a Love Story. He went to Antarctica in 1995 and 2016, courtesy of the US National Science Foundation. He was a featured speaker at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP-26), and at the UN’s Summit of the Future in 2024. His work has been translated into 29 languages. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." The New Yorker has written that he is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers." In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”