Books

The closest magnetar ever discovered is sitting in our cosmic backyard. And there is no way to know if it has already fired.

Solar physicist James Chen's life is stable, if not exactly thrilling: teaching undergraduates, reviewing papers, sharing custody of his fifteen year old daughter Lily. Then a grad student walks into his office with X-ray data that doesn't make sense. A neutron star with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's, an object capable of releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in a quarter million years, has been found just twenty eight light-years away. Hidden in the dust of the galactic plane. Unnoticed until now.

If it quakes, the gamma radiation will shred the ozone layer. And the warning travels at the same speed as the weapon.

Starquake is a hard science fiction story about the collision between cosmic indifference and human love. Grounded in real magnetar physics, real atmospheric chemistry, and real neutrino detection science, it follows one man caught between the knowledge that the sky might already be falling and the ordinary, irreplaceable mornings he spends with his daughter.

They traveled ninety years to reach their new home. The planet was nothing like they expected.

Ross 128 b was supposed to be the answer. A rocky world in the habitable zone, orbiting a quiet red dwarf star eleven light years from an Earth none of them had ever seen. The generation ship Shackleton carried 2,000 colonists across the void, four generations born and raised inside a metal hull, all of them aiming for a narrow band of twilight on a tidally locked planet where the models said they could build a life.

The models were wrong.

Governor Yuki Tanabe steps onto the surface and into hurricane force winds that never stop, driven by a 280 degree temperature gradient between a dayside that burns and a nightside that freezes. The habitable zone is a wind tunnel. The ship behind them is dying. And there is nowhere else to go.

Terminator is a hard science fiction novelette about survival, endurance, and what it means to build a home on a world that owes you nothing.

Twenty percent of the sky has never been seen. Anya Okafor built a telescope to change that.

Anya grew up listening to her father speak of the Great Attractor, the immense gravitational pull drawing galaxies toward a hidden region behind the Milky Way. For thirty one years he studied what he could not directly observe. He died in his Lagos study surrounded by annotated printouts and unfinished calculations, certain there was order in the noise.

Years later, Anya leads the team operating Concordia, a next generation telescope designed to peer through the Zone of Avoidance. When its first images arrive, they reveal structure where conventional models predict randomness. Patterns begin to emerge that echo the work her father was once dismissed for pursuing.

The discovery forces Anya to confront the possibility that the universe is not as indifferent as it appears.

The Pull is a hard science fiction novel about inheritance, doubt, and what it means to look deeper when the answers begin looking back.