Jonathan Strahan has acquired Greg Egan’s next novella, Perihelion Summer, for Tor.com Publishing!

Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.

Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever.

Perihelion Summer is the story of people struggling to adapt to a suddenly alien environment, and the friendships and alliances they forge as they try to find their way in a world where the old maps have lost their meaning.

Said author Greg Egan:

In October 2017, when I started writing Perihelion Summer, I’d already been thinking about the plot for a while, but one question still lingered at the back of my mind: would readers suspend disbelief in a story where an object from interstellar space enters the solar system purely by chance? On a scale that’s measured in light years, even the orbit of Jupiter makes a very small target. But then, three weeks into the writing, an extraordinary event hit the news: the first interstellar visitor ever observed, now known as “Oumuamua,” had just passed within 24 million kilometres of the Earth: six times closer to us than the sun! Taraxippus in Perihelion Summer is a very different kind of object—but the void had begun to seem a lot more crowded.

Said acquiring editor Jonathan Strahan:

I love Greg Egan’s work. I rank his “Learning to be Me” and “Reasons to be Cheerful” amongst the best short stories I’ve read and amongst the best science fiction short stories that anyone has written. His short fiction is engaged, passionate, and powerful, often touching on issues to do with migration and immigration. I’ve been very lucky to work with Greg on a number of occasions over the past 20 years, and I was really excited at the chance to bring his work to Tor.com. Greg’s novellas, like Hugo winner Oceanic, are some of his very best work, and I can’t wait to see how readers will respond to Perihelion Summer.

Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of many acclaimed science fiction novels. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Egan’s short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov’s, Nature, and Tor.com. He lives in Australia.

Perihelion Summer will be released in 2019.