Every month, Baen Books sends us a selection of their newest releases and we share them with you. They’ve been bringing readers science fiction and fantasy for decades.
Light of the Veil
Written by: Richard Fox
Cover Artist: Dominic Harman
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES December 5, 2023
A YOUNG HERO JOURNEYS BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE IN A DESPERATE BID TO SAVE THE GALAXY FROM THE POWERS OF EVIL
ADVENTURE BEYOND THE STARS
Jayce Artan is a dock rat on a poor fringe world where he takes every job he can and prize-fights to earn enough money to get off world. When he’s hired to guide a boat crewed by an interstellar mafia, he comes face to face with an ancient power—the Veil—that was pivotal to a civil war that ended decades ago.
Jayce is “Attuned” to this power and was almost killed by agents of the dead and defeated Tyrant who nearly enslaved the galaxy. He’s rescued by an Adept of the Paragon order, warrior scholars that study the power and seek to keep any from upsetting the balance that keeps all life in order.
Jayce is given the chance to journey beyond the Veil and into another dimension where he can claim a stone of immense power and return it to base reality and wield it as a weapon against the Tyrant. The world beyond the Veil is nothing like what Jayce knows, and he’ll be opposed by insidious evil, self-doubt, and sabotage from the very people who are supposed to help him.
While beyond the Veil, Jayce learns that a Conjunction is nigh, an event that could sunder the galaxy if evil forces succeed. Jayce must claim a Veil stone deep in the other dimension before the Tyrant’s agents can beat him to the prize.
The Icarus Twin
Written by: Timothy Zahn
Cover Artist: Dave Seeley
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES December 5, 2023
A NEW NOVEL IN THE ICARUS SERIES FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADMIRAL THRAWN STAR WARS NOVELS TIMOTHY ZAHN
For years Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene worked as crocketts, combing through the atmospheres of uninhabited worlds for places that might be colonized or hold valuable resources. Now, they quietly work for the Icarus Group, a top-secret government organization hunting for portals created by a long-vanished alien race, portals that can teleport a person hundreds or thousands of light-years in the blink of an eye.
Roarke and Selene are searching one such possibility when they find that someone appears to be stalking them. They evade their pursuers and return to find that a man named Easton Dent has been searching the Spiral’s databases for the names Gregory Roarke and Icarus.
Roarke reluctantly agrees to meet with him. But that first contact is cut short, and hours later Roarke is arrested and accused of Dent’s murder.
More importantly to Roarke’s Icarus Group overseers, that brief meeting also confirms that Dent was in recent contact with a portal.
But the alien Patth are also searching for such portals, and they are also on the trail. It’s now a race . . . and the Patth have resources and ruthlessness far beyond anything Roarke and Selene can match.
Protected Species
Written by: Charles E. Gannon
Cover Artist: Dominic Harman
Maps by: Rhys Davies
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES December 5, 2023
Caine Riordan and his self-styled “Crewe” have survived their first months on the planet they call Bactradgaria. They’ve overcome floods, dust storms, tornadoes, searing heat, bitter cold, desperate battles, and attacks by various strange species. However, their most desperate struggles have been against the wildly ferocious x’qao, for whom the pursuit and genocide of other beings is as much a sport as it is a strategy.
Accordingly, Caine and his friends realize that if they are to endure, they must not merely survive but thrive. So far, they’ve done just that and made friends along the way. But a few scattered tribes and towns can’t defeat the x’qao and their vassals. To do that, humans must claw higher up the food chain . . . before they tumble off into extinction.
Threading the Needle
Written by: Monalisa Foster
Cover Artist: Dominic Harman
Format: Paperback
RELEASES December 5, 2023
A NEW START—OR AN OLD CALLING?
Talia Merritt, a former military sniper once known as Death’s Handmaiden, is a woman haunted by her past. Her cybernetic arm and the implant that allows her to control it serve as a constant reminder of what she’s lost. But Talia is hoping to leave her past and her reputation behind and start anew on the colony world of Goruden, a hardscrabble planet of frontier-minded people seeking a better life. And she’s finally earned enough to start to make that dream come true.
In the bucolic town of Tsurui, she interviews for a job as a marksmanship instructor for local bigwig Signore Ferran Contesti. But Contesi is not what he seems. A recent arrival on Goruden, he hopes to mold the colony world in his own image—an image at odds with the unencumbered life free of government and corporate meddling that Talia has come to find.
Soon, Talia finds herself thrust into the start of another conflict. Talia desperately wants to stay out of it, but she may not have that luxury.
With the fate of a planet and her own peace of mind hanging in the balance, Talia must decide whether or not to once again take up the mantle of Death’s Handmaiden.
Haunted By The Past
Written by: Simon R. Green
Cover Artist: Kurt Miller
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES November 28, 2023
ISHMAEL JONES NOVEL FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLINGURBAN FANTASY NOVELIST SIMON R. GREEN. SUPERNATURAL DETECTIVE ISHMAEL JONES IS BACK IN THIS LATEST INSTALLMENT OF GREEN’S POPULAR SERIES.
Ishmael Jones knows all there is to know about solving mysteries. Together with his love and partner in crimes, Penny Belcourt, he specializes in cases of the weird and uncanny.
Lucas Carr went to Glenbury Hall, an old country manor house turned hotel. He signed in at reception, took his key, and went upstairs to his room. But he never got there. Somehow he vanished along the way, with not a single clue to suggest what might have happened to him.
Lucas belonged to the same mysterious organization that employs Ishmael and Penny, so they are sent in to solve the mystery. But when they arrive at grim and isolated Glenbury Hall, they discover it has a reputation as one of the most haunted old houses in England. None of the usual headless monks or walled-up nuns—just stories of lost souls that dance with the statues in the grounds; doors that won’t stay shut, and rooms that aren’t always there; and something that prowls the house in the early hours, endlessly searching. They say . . . it crawls.
Does Lucas’ disappearance have something to do with the organization or the Hall’s haunted past? Ishmael and Penny have to work their way through a series of mysterious clues and misleading suspects, uncovering secret after secret, before they finally arrive at a truth that no one suspected.
The problem with history is that it’s not always content to stay in the past.
Worlds Long Lost
Edited by: Christopher Ruocchio and Sean CW Korsgaard
Cover Artist: Bob Eggleton
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES November 28, 2023
STORIES OF ANCIENT ALIEN ARTIFACTS FROM THE TOP NAMES IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
THE UNIVERSE IS OLDER AND MORE ALIEN THAN WE CAN EVER UNDERSTAND
We were not alone. The farther we push into the universe, the more obvious it becomes. The signs are everywhere: canals and pyramids on Mars, old roads on the moons of Jupiter, ruined cities on worlds about the nearer stars. The galaxy once teemed with life, or so it seems. Which begs the question: What happened to it all?
These stories explore the ruins of lost civilizations, solve ancient mysteries . . . and awaken horrors from beyond the dawn of time.
Featuring stories by Orson Scott Card, Griffin Barber, Adam Oyebanji, Jessica Maguire, Patrick Chiles, and an all-new entry in the Sun Eater universe from editor Christopher Ruocchio. Join us for your next adventure to Worlds Long Lost!
Summer’s End
Edited by: John Van Stry
Cover Artist: Sam R. Kennedy
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES November 28, 2023
SOMETIMES A DARK PAST CAN HAUNT YOU. OTHER TIMES, IT JUST MAY BE THE ONLY THING KEEPING YOU ALIVE.
Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn’t his straight C average. It’s that his stepfather, a powerful Earth Senator he’s never met, wants him dead.
Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life, plying the routes that the corporations ignore and visiting the kinds of places that the folks on Earth pretend don’t exist.
Between the assassins, the criminals, and the pirates he needs to deal with, Dave is discovering that there are a lot of things out there that he still needs to learn.
But there’s one hard lesson he learned long ago that he’s being forced to remember: how to be ruthless.
Publisher – Baen Books
Founded by Jim Baen, Baen Books has been bringing readers pulse-pounding, thought-provoking adventures straight from the heart of science fiction and fantasy for decades. We publish books in hardcover, paperback, and electronic form, and are one of the few traditional publishers that maintains its own ebooks webstore (with at least four new titles added every month). We are also perhaps the only book publisher to make our electronic advanced readers copies (eARCs) available for sale to devoted fans before a book’s official release date. In addition, we also sell ebooks from other publishers. We sell more than 2000 books from over 500 authors published by 24 different companies. Good reading to all!
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