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Terminator: Hard Science Fiction on a World That Never Turns
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.
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.
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.
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
94 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 25, 2026
About the author
Alan Voss
7 books11 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 11, 2026
I’m on my third novelette by this author. Each story explores a fascinating, terrifying scientific concept and does it really well.
May 25, 2026
This novella is reasonably priced at $1.99 and is definitely in the hard science wing of SF, which is not usually my favorite. Correspondingly, the relationships among the characters are not there for their own sake, but to fuel plot developments. Still, it's a gritty, realistic tale of survival on a challenging world where the antagonist is that world's nature. The story is about as good as it can be given the limitations the plot sets for itself. Recommended especially for lovers of hard SF, generation ship stories, and environmental thriller readers.
July 1, 2026
I just love these books. Sure, it's hard sci-fi, with very plausible plot points. But what really makes it so good is the humanity of the characters. The author builds an impressive world in a short story, and includes some great turns of phrases along the way.
I also appreciate that the cast of characters did not need to be white American males for people to read this book.
I also appreciate that the cast of characters did not need to be white American males for people to read this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews