The book is **free** on Kindle during the promotion period.

**The premise**: Anya Okafor is the lead astrophysicist aboard the survey vessel *Meridian*, stationed at L2 alongside *Concordia*, a next generation infrared telescope she helped design. Her crew operates *Concordia* remotely from 40 kilometers away because even the warmth of a human body would blind its cryogenic sensors. Her father spent 31 years studying the Great Attractor, a gravitational anomaly pulling hundreds of thousands of galaxies toward a region hidden behind the Milky Way's dust and gas (the Zone of Avoidance). His work was dismissed. He died without answers. When Concordia's first images pierce through the blind spot, Anya sees structure where every model predicts randomness, echoing exactly what her father claimed was there.

The science is real. The Great Attractor, the Zone of Avoidance, large scale cosmic flows, the Laniakea supercluster, these are all genuine astrophysical phenomena. The book includes a nonfiction appendix explaining where the real science ends and the fiction begins.

"The Pull" is the first of 12 standalone hard sci-fi stories I'm working on, each grounded in a different area of real physics and astronomy.

I built an author site at '**alanvoss.me**' where you can read the full first chapter and see the characters before deciding if it's for you.

'The Pull' - A hard sci-fi novelette grounded in real astrophysics about the Zone of Avoidance and the Great Attractor