Cosmic Thresholds, Volume I

A gravitational anomaly behind the Milky Way. A colony on a planet that never turns. A dead star twenty eight light-years away, ticking toward detonation.

Cosmic Thresholds, Volume I collects three standalone hard science fiction novelettes, each grounded in real physics and following a different scientist confronting a discovery that changes everything.

In The Pull, astrophysicist Anya Okafor aims a next-generation telescope at the Zone of Avoidance, the twenty percent of the sky the Milky Way hides from view. The first images reveal structure where models predict randomness, and patterns that echo the work her father was dismissed for pursuing decades earlier in Lagos.

In Terminator, Governor Yuki Tanabe leads 2,000 colonists off a dying generation ship onto Ross 128 b, a tidally locked world where the dayside burns, the nightside freezes, and the habitable zone is a permanent hurricane. The models promised safety. The wind says otherwise.

In Starquake, solar physicist James Chen learns that a magnetar, a neutron star with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's, has been found just twenty eight light-years away. If it quakes, the gamma radiation will shred the ozone layer. The warning travels at the same speed as the weapon.

Three stories about what happens when the data stops being theoretical and starts being personal.

Approximately 54,000 words. Each story can be read independently in about two hours. Includes a real-science appendix at the end of each story.