IN The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden, Margaret Drabble’s ingenious story for the new sci-fi anthology Collision, a character called Jaz works on “the interface of language and quantum physics”. Jaz’s speciality is “the speaking of the inexpressible”. Science fiction authors have long grappled with translating cutting-edge research – much of it grounded in what Drabble calls “the Esperanto of Equations” – into everyday language and engaging plots.
Advertisement
Few domains seem to pose a tougher challenge to narrative art than CERN, the particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Since 1954, its scientists have transformed the boldest ideas about the universe into theories grounded in experimental data. CERN’s heroic exploits stretch from birthing the world wide web in 1989 to confirming the Higgs boson hypothesis in 2012.
But its combination of gargantuan plant (the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s ultimate ring of power, has a circumference of 27 kilometres) and interrogation of the smallest, oldest events in and beyond our galaxy may escape the human middle ground where even high-concept fiction has to dwell.
Undaunted, editors Rob Appleby and Connie Potter matched CERN scientists with writers tasked to turn their research areas into accessible short stories. The 13 tales, accompanied by afterwords from the researchers, take different narrative approaches to elusive quantum ideas, and not every one precisely strikes its target. But the collection grounds speculation in scientific, and social, reality – unlike Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, which turned on the theft of weapons-grade antimatter from CERN.
One story, Bidisha Mamata’s Afterglow, cleverly delivers a parody of Brown’s potboiler, complete with an antimatter-obsessed genius and an apocalyptic finale. Her enjoyably outlandish tale triggers a sober discussion (by CERN partner Kristin Lohwasser) of safety measures and the realities of radiation exposure.
Other stories weld idea-rich plots to close-up observation of CERN’s facilities: a scruffy concrete village, cluttered with tinfoil, cables and yellowing printouts. Some authors tilt towards CERN’s social context, as Luan Goldie does in Marble Run with a hard-pressed mother (a supersymmetry specialist) who imagines “things that aren’t, but could be” while the real world blocks her path. In Dark Matters, Lucy Caldwell sends her protagonist back to Belfast, and a dying parent, to ponder the pull of family gravity.
In contrast, hardcore sci-fi voyagers may boldly go straight for part of CERN’s conceptual core, with stories prompted by the quest to understand dark matter. In Going Dark by former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, snoopers into this hidden substance find themselves “unpicked from the fabric of reality” (“implausible but not impossible”, deems researcher Peter Dong in his afterword). And Ian Watson’s witty Skipping resolves the hoary sci-fi problem of interstellar travel times with craft that “jump” on graviton beams across a scrunched-up, non-Euclidean tablecloth of space.
With Gauguin’s Questions, veteran sci-fi world-builder Stephen Baxter aims highest of all, inventing a moon-based AI investigator whose millennia-long stewardship of particle colliders identified “an intelligence of the past that wrote its story into our sky”. This vision feels light years away from CERN’s tangled wires and coffee stains. But, as scientist Carole Weydert writes in response to Goldie’s tale, there “every grey concrete wall holds the promise of undiscovered truths just below the surface”. Collision lets laypeople glimpse, and share, some of them.
Boyd Tonkin is a critic based in London
