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The Pull: A Hard Science Fiction Quest Beyond the Blind Spot
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.
A standalone novelette (approx. 18,000 words) in the Cosmic Thresholds collection, Volume I. Each story is a complete narrative, designed to be read in about two hours.
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.
A standalone novelette (approx. 18,000 words) in the Cosmic Thresholds collection, Volume I. Each story is a complete narrative, designed to be read in about two hours.
- GenresScience Fiction
91 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 26, 2026
About the author
Alan Voss
6 books5 followersAlan Voss is a veteran technology architect and lifelong astronomy enthusiast who writes hard science fiction grounded in real physics.
His COSMIC THRESHOLDS collection puts working scientists in front of the universe's most extreme phenomena and asks what happens next. A solar physicist discovers a magnetar close enough to sterilize Earth's atmosphere. A governor leads 2,000 colonists onto a tidally locked planet where the wind never stops. An astrobiologist descends through twenty one kilometers of ice into an ocean on a rogue planet drifting between the stars. An astrophysicist builds a telescope to peer into the one region of the sky no one has ever seen, and the data starts looking back. Each story starts with a real object, a real process, a real piece of physics, and follows it to its human consequences.
The stories are standalone novelettes, each about 18,000 words, designed to be read in a single sitting and in any order. The science is accessible. The physics is real. The protagonists are professionals who understand exactly what they are facing, which tends to make things worse.
Alan grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, and Peter Watts, and their fingerprints are all over this work.
His COSMIC THRESHOLDS collection puts working scientists in front of the universe's most extreme phenomena and asks what happens next. A solar physicist discovers a magnetar close enough to sterilize Earth's atmosphere. A governor leads 2,000 colonists onto a tidally locked planet where the wind never stops. An astrobiologist descends through twenty one kilometers of ice into an ocean on a rogue planet drifting between the stars. An astrophysicist builds a telescope to peer into the one region of the sky no one has ever seen, and the data starts looking back. Each story starts with a real object, a real process, a real piece of physics, and follows it to its human consequences.
The stories are standalone novelettes, each about 18,000 words, designed to be read in a single sitting and in any order. The science is accessible. The physics is real. The protagonists are professionals who understand exactly what they are facing, which tends to make things worse.
Alan grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, and Peter Watts, and their fingerprints are all over this work.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 20, 2026
Hard to start, but fairly quickly locked me in
I really like the story, concepts, characters and the science plus, to a person of faith the teasing of a higher power or intelligence or whatever was fun. I'd love to explore the imagination of what a continuation might be.
I really like the story, concepts, characters and the science plus, to a person of faith the teasing of a higher power or intelligence or whatever was fun. I'd love to explore the imagination of what a continuation might be.
March 14, 2026
My review can be summed up in one word: MORE!
This was just too short. Well crafted, well written, I was invested in a big way. It's too short! I want more! I really hope this is just the first entry in a series.
This was just too short. Well crafted, well written, I was invested in a big way. It's too short! I want more! I really hope this is just the first entry in a series.
May 15, 2026
Hard Sci-Fi With a Heart!
The Pull is more than a child seeking to continue with legacy of parent story. It also goes beyond seeing what’s on other side of the Milky Way Galaxy cluster. This story is what happens when a discredited scientist from Africa, working with rudimentary graphs from a radiotelescope, has a theory about the inner workings of the universe but doesn’t live long enough to prove it. So Voss takes us on the deep space journey of his daughter to see if his theory holds and maybe… unravel the secrets of the reality as we know it. But more than that, the Pull is a beautifully and scientifically sound ride through astronomy, love, redemption, and the questions that make us human, regardless of where we find ourselves in the cosmos.
The Pull is more than a child seeking to continue with legacy of parent story. It also goes beyond seeing what’s on other side of the Milky Way Galaxy cluster. This story is what happens when a discredited scientist from Africa, working with rudimentary graphs from a radiotelescope, has a theory about the inner workings of the universe but doesn’t live long enough to prove it. So Voss takes us on the deep space journey of his daughter to see if his theory holds and maybe… unravel the secrets of the reality as we know it. But more than that, the Pull is a beautifully and scientifically sound ride through astronomy, love, redemption, and the questions that make us human, regardless of where we find ourselves in the cosmos.
April 17, 2026
As much as I love hard sci-fi, I ended up skimming parts of this one because it goes into a lot of detail and I really wanted to see where it would take me.
It’s definitely one I could go back and re-read though, interesting concepts.
It’s definitely one I could go back and re-read though, interesting concepts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews