The planet we had thought we inhabited, spinning around a giant orb, singular in its abundance of life⎯that world is gone now. The man of Summer's dreams has become the man of her nightmares. All has turned to madness when a flash of exploding light arising out of a lake signals we are not the sole occupants of this universe or this planet we call Earth. How are we to comprehend this new found danger? Who or what is it? What can they do to a fragile human mind? All sense of normalcy dissolves, old world perceptions collapse giving way to something very new and strange. Cygnus marks a shift in the Barry Short adventure novels. The series has explored the past through archeological finds until in Cygnus the present comes crashing through in an otherworldly scenario.