Collision: Stories from the science of CERN - Comma Press

Released in 2023, Collision is a collection of science-fiction short stories featuring collaborations between scientists at CERN and fiction authors. The result is a fascinating fusion of speculative fiction and cutting-edge science.

Published by Comma Press, a Manchester based not-for-profit publisher specialising in short-fiction. Comma Press began their story in 2007, and since then have tucked multiple awards under their belt, including the World Fantasy Award (Robert Shearman's Tiny Deaths, 2008) the Shirley Jackson Award (Anthology series: The New Uncanny, 2008) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Hassan Blasim's The Iraqi Christ, 2014). Comma is perhaps best known for their Reading the City series, short story collections about different cities across the globe, written by authors who live in them. The series spans more than 30 volumes, with tales from Tokyo to Istanbul, Gaza to Bradford.

Comma’s resources page is a hidden gem for aspiring authors and publishers:

https://commapress.co.uk/resources.

It features upcoming writing courses (such as the Crime Fiction: Short Story Course with Chris McDonald), free video resources, writing exercises, and information about the three annual conferences they host each year. Among them is the Publishing Insights Day—co-hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University—a must-attend for anyone hoping to break into publishing:

commapress.co.uk/events/publishing-insights-day-2025.

Collision isn’t Comma’s first collaborative collection between scientists and authors. Their 2017 release, Thought X featured stories based on classic thought experiments such as the twin paradox, the grandfather paradox, Schrödinger’s cat and Einstein in a lift.

In Collision, thirteen short stories tackle a different concept from modern physics. Every story is followed by a scientist-written afterword, offering insight into the science behind the fiction. Authors were assigned a CERN scientist to collaborate with, and each travelled to Geneva to visit the lab itself. It’s an ambitious project that has yielded imaginative yet rigorously grounded narratives based on the most widely accepted theories in contemporary physics.

The collection includes contributions from an impressive cast of writers. Perhaps the most recognisable is Stephen Baxter, a household name among science-fiction readers, known for sweeping cosmic timelines and collaborations with the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Terry Pratchett. His story in Collision, set over a mere 2,000 years, follows an AI managing a lunar particle accelerator.

Other contributors include:

Bidisha – broadcaster, journalist, filmmaker and Guardian critic

Stephen Moffat – screenwriter and producer behind Doctor Who and Sherlock

Lucy Caldwell – award-winning author of These Days, Multitudes, and Intimacies

Margaret Drabble – literary heavyweight with 19 novels across six decades

Luan Goldie – author of Nightingale Point, shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize

The tone and content of the stories are as varied as their authors. Some lean deeply into surrealism and speculative flourishes—such as Stephen Moffat’s Going Dark, which features eerie chimp-women and battles against time itself. Others stay grounded in the emotional and ethical tensions of working at CERN—like Luan Goldie’s Marble Run, which explores the balance between scientific ambition and family life. Peter Kalu’s Side Channels to Andromeda dives into a tense narrative involving a security breach at the lab.

At one point in the collection, a character reflects:

In twenty years there has been time for the gravitational-wave signal, travelling at light speed, to have reached objects ten light years distant and evoked a reply - twenty years, ten out ten back. There are twelve stellar objects within ten light years of the sun. Perhaps all that can be surmised for now is that in our galaxy, on average there may be less than 1 technological communicating civilisation like our own per dozen stars.

This is the kind of intellectually rich, contemplative tone you can expect throughout—made all the more potent by the real-world commentary that follows each tale.

Collision is a must read for science-fiction fans who want their stories grounded in reality. But it’s equally rewarding for readers curious about science, or those simply looking for fiction that challenges them. The afterwords are accessible to non-scientists, offering both clarity and candid reflections on working within one of the world’s most iconic research institutions.

Pick it up from Comma Press!

https://commapress.co.uk/books/collision