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. Now, to start the Bulletin’s 80th year of publication, they are launching a short fiction contest called “Write Before Midnight,” which will be judged by acclaimed American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.

Submitted stories can 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 can be dystopian or utopian; pre-, post-, or non-apocalyptic. They can be optimistic as Sesame Street or dark as Edgar Allan Poe’s basement. Entries can 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 will be not just allowed, but celebrated. The tales can be comic, tragic, ironic, satiric, or any kind of -ic at all, and they can be of any length—up to 7,000 words. (And not a single word more.) The stories can be prose or graphic form, aka comic books, after all, the “Doomsday Clock” was an important part of Watchmen.

The stories do, however, need to have some conceivable connection to the Bulletin’s interest in (avoiding) the Apocalypse. The connection doesn’t necessarily have to be central to the story; a porkpie hat that Oppenheimer abandoned in a greasy diner might do the trick. But the existential-threat angle must be clear.

To have a chance at winning, the stories have to be very, very good. There’s real money for the winners: $3,000 for first place, with $500 each to four runners-up. All five of the winning stories will be featured in the January 2026 issue of the Bulletin’s bimonthly magazine.

So, whether they’re porkpies or derbies or hipster fedoras, put on your writing hats and get to work. You have until September 30 to send in your stories. What time on September 30, you ask? It couldn’t possibly be midnight, could it?

Meet the judge, Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards and author the bestselling Mars trilogy:

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.”

How to submit your writing:

Ready to outrun the apocalypse with your prose? Here’s how to toss your (writing) hat into the ring:

• Send your story as an attachment (PDF or Word document preferred) to writebeforemidnight@thebulletin.org
• Include your name, email address, and the title of your story in the body of your email
• Deadline: September 30, 2025 — and yes, they’ll be watching the clock
• Maximum word count: 7,000 words. Not 7,001. They mean it.

There’s no fee to enter, and no genre off-limits—as long as your story clearly connects to the Bulletin’s bread and butter: the business of not ending the world.