Write a piece of sci-fi flash fiction that starts at the end of your story.
Congratulations! Your amazing submission for the March SFS theme prompt has won the editors' choice award as the best story this month. It is, in fact, the most engaging, intellectually fulfilling story ever published in SFS. We believe your work has a good chance of winning a Nebula!
How did you do it? Well, let me tell you...
The bi-monthly theme posting came out one week earlier than normal, way back on March 8, 2025. Some say it was the nice spring weather motivating a slovenly prompt editor. But the true reason is far more sinister.
You see, the contest season had distracted SFS writers and drastically reduced the number of great submissions from which SFS publishes every single weekday. There had to be a way to remind writers how much fun it is to write sci-fi flash!
And it worked. You used the extra time and motivation to write this astounding story. Only you, with your laudable imagination and writing skill, could have come up with such an evocative and fascinating tale and manage to tell it... backward!
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 begin at the end of your plotline.
Most of us are accustomed to writing in a straight line, temporally speaking. This happened, and then that happened, and finally, there's a twist at the end. For this prompt, let's turn that on its head. Start with the climax, the end result, or the final resolution. And then, tell us how the heck we got there.
After the opening, your story may progress in the usual direction of time, or it may go in reverse chronological order. The plot might even hop around or have no discernable causal order until we reach the end. I mean, the beginning, or... whatever. You get the picture, I hope.
But be careful. Resist the urge to flood the reader with a wall of exposition or backstory immediately after your opening scene as if you’re trying to apologize for having started at the wrong end of things. Commit to the structure and follow through purposefully in the scenes that follow, building on the effect you’ve created and delivering bits of exposition and backstory only as needed.
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 (Begin at the Big Ending) in the Notes field of the submissions form.
Submissions must be received by April 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 of the Month.
Exemplars
This kind of narrative structure is sometimes called in medias res, which is a Latin phrase meaning "in the middle of things." In our case, we're looking for in fine res, or, "at the end of things". That sounds rather post-apocalyptic, and in fact, many stories in that sub-genre are structured in fine res. Time travel stories also often use this mechanism. Nothing says your story must fall into either of those sub-genres, since any story can be so structured.
Here are some examples of vintage short stories written in fine res.
A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter Michael Miller Jr., The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), April 1955. This story begins centuries after a nuclear war, with monks preserving fragments of pre-apocalyptic knowledge, slowly unveiling the history of the civilization that destroyed itself. Miller wrote the short story a decade after he participated, as tail gunner in a WWII bomber, in the destruction of the world's oldest Christian church. The story became Fiat Homo, Part 1 of his later fix-up novel.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas — Ursula K. Le Guin, New Dimensions 3, October 1973. The city Le Guin describes in the first scene of her tale is seemingly the opposite of dystopia. It is a utopia where everyone is happy and the sun always shines. There's a catch, of course, which is slowly and non-linearly revealed in the rest of the story. This piece of philosophical sci-fi explores a deep ethical dilemma that was previously posed in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
A Sound of Thunder — Ray Bradbury, Colliers, June 1952. A time-traveling hunter finds himself facing down the biggest of the big game 70 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period. The rest of the story explores the consequences of his actions there.
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Speaking of time travel, imagine how many people would pay good money to travel back in time to see you sit down before an empty computer screen and start writing your sci-fi masterpiece — the one that changed the world as we knew it. The one that begins with...
— The End
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