Pull up a Log
Other Colours
Shaker Loop
A Visit at St. Nick’s
Spaceman
Tales of the Beachcomber
Six
Goodnight New York, New York
The Descendant
The Worm
SF Caledonia
Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century
Interview: Stephen Palmer
Noise and Sparks 3: Interlude
Reviews
Multiverse
Parabolic Puzzles
Pull up a Log
Gareth L Powell posted this tweet on the day of the US Presidential election:
If you are that writer in 2056 reading this, please borrow your inventor friend’s time-machine to nip back to us and hand us a copy of your book for review. It’s no use in this timeline now, but it would be good to read what might have been...
While you’re here, writer from the future, I hope you enjoy this Christmas flavoured issue. I like to imagine you returning to your present (hope the radiation levels are normalising), and sharing these wond’rous tales, pictures, poems, reviews, and writings with your friends.
You will also meet our new cover character—Reader. Stephen Pickering leapt at the brief of creating our covers for the coming year and we are delighted with the result.
On another note, a reader contacted us in the summer to say she would love to visit Shoreline HQ, and take a tour—we oblige in our seasonal comic story, and I hope, dear reader, it is as you imagined it would be.
Happy reading everyone!
Noel Chidwick
Editor-in-chief
Shoreline of Infinity
December 2016
Other Colours
Michael F Russell
Art: Mark Toner
He’s close now. He can feel it. Everyone else has gone home:
it is just himself left, staying late.
Too late.
He is close now. Too close to share the moment with anyone else.
Sitting at his terminal, alone among banks of darkened workstations, Dr John Fisher studies the latest beam-collision signatures. He could do with a shave, a haircut and an ironed shirt; the glass of mulled wine he was offered sits beyond arms-length, unsipped. With thumb and slender forefinger he flips and tweaks the latest on-screen collider schematic, a femtosecond monochrome spray of sub-proton debris, fragmenting from a central collision point.
“Non-scalar,” he mutters to himself. “Spin zero. But the electroweak breaking is not spontaneous.” He frowns at the screen, whispering. “What is controlling it?”
