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. Here are the previews for Baen Books December releases.
Magelight
Written by: Kacey Ezell
Cover Artist: Sam R. Kennedy
Maps by: Rhys Davis
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES May 6, 2025
Fleeing her sheltered life, a noblewoman must trust a warrior, a forester, and a thief to unlock her true power and face her destiny.
Embrace Your Power and Forge Your Destiny
All her life, Aelys of Brionne had been weak. As the noble daughter of one of the empire’s most powerful magic-wielding families, it should have been easy for her to live her dream of bonding with a warrior protector and joining the Imperial Battlemage Corps. But when her weakness robs her of her dreams, her best friend, and the man she loves, Aelys makes the only choice she can see: she takes her fate into her own hands and she runs, leaving her safe, protected world behind.
Now she must find a way to work with three dangerous strangers—a warrior, a forester, and a thief—to escape the bandits stalking her, fight through the dangers of the untamed forest, and make her way back home, where her family and her destiny await.
Only . . . her violent protectors might be the key to the power and freedom she’s always craved. Can Aelys find the strength to choose her own destiny and become the sorceress she was born to be? Or lose herself on the path to power?
Rhymer Hel
Written by: Gregory Frost
Cover Artist: Eric Williams
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES May 6, 2025
A Wild Chase Through Elizabethan England
Thomas the Rhymer, immortal, shape-changing foe of the diabolical Elf Queen and her merciless Yvag knights, continues his one-man war into the reign of England’s “Faerie Queen”—Elizabeth I. When he learns of an assassination plot against Elizabeth, the Rhymer intervenes, only to find himself the object of the special attention of the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham.
Walsingham blackmails the Rhymer into joining his intelligence network. Allied with Walsingham’s minions and a mysterious shape-changing stage actress, Thomas finds he must deal with Mary, Queen of Scots, scheming Jesuits, and Italian bankers as well as further Yvag attempts against Elizabeth. He moves in the circles of William Shakespeare, John Dee, Giordano Bruno, and Christopher Marlowe, desperately defeating one conspiracy after another in defense of the throne, leading him to an inevitable final confrontation with the Elf Queen, in which to survive he must destroy the source of her power . . . and to do that, he must enter the mouth of Hel itself.
After all the sacrifice, will the Rhymer find peace? And, perhaps, even love?
To Turn The Tide
Written by: S.M Stirling
Cover Artist: Sam R. Kennedy
Format: Paperback
RELEASES May 6, 2025
New time travel military adventure from New York Times best-selling novelist S.M. Stirling
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
Many could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn’t avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set up an out for himself: he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad he didn’t get to use it himself.
Instead, a team of American grad students, led by their professor, is sent back to the late Roman Empire. Even though they are experts in this time and place, they are about to realize that books and actual experience are very different things.
If they can survive, they hope to remake the world into a better place. But that’s a big “if.”
Toll of Honor
Written by: David Weber
Cover Artist: David Mattingly
Format: Paperback
RELEASES May 6, 2025
A NEW SOLO NOVEL IN DAVID WEBER’S NYT BEST-SELLING HONORVERSE
“It is our duty to pay for our liberty with our own blood. The freedom that we shall win through our sacrifice and exertions, we shall be able to preserve with our own strength.” —Subhas Chandra Bose
Lieutenant Brandy Bolgeo has come home from the Battle of Hancock Station wounded in both body and spirit. She will need months to regenerate her lost leg, but how long will it take to heal her heart?
She’s come home to find that her wounds, her ship’s brutal damage, the deaths of so many friends, were the fault of an arrogant, aristocratic coward who broke and ran in the face of the enemy. Who left her ship to pay the price for his craven desertion under fire. And whose powerful political allies are determined to protect and preserve him at any price.
They have held hostage the declaration of war until Lord Pavel Young escaped the consequences of his cowardice. They didn’t care what it cost the Navy. They didn’t care what it cost the entire Star Kingdom of Manticore. Their tactics have cost the Royal Navy the priceless initiative as revolution and military purges wrack the People’s Republic of Haven, and that lost window of opportunity will cost the Star Kingdom seventeen years of bloody warfare and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Now Young is free to seek vengeance on the people he feels have “wronged” him. People like Paul Tankersley and Honor Harrington. Paid duelists, smear tactics, hired assassins in public restaurants . . . nothing is beneath Pavel Young. But Captain Harrington can look after herself, and Pavel Young is about to face the fury of the woman the newsies call the “Salamander.” Yet who will save the Star Kingdom from the repercussions of his actions?
Women and men like Brandy Bolgeo are about to pay the toll for the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s honor.
Swords of Exodus
Written by: Larry Correia and Mike Kupari
Cover Artist: Kurt Miller
Format: Paperback
RELEASES April 15, 2025
Sequel to thriller Dead Six. From the author of the New York Times bestselling Monster Hunter series and an Air Force weapons expert, an edge-of-your-seat military-political thriller. A master thief and a hard-hitting mercenary team up to defeat a Central Asian warlord with worldwide destruction on his mind.
The hard-hitting sequel to groundbreaking military adventure Dead Six.
On the far side of the world, deep in former Soviet Central Asia, lies a stronghold called the Crossroads. It is run with an iron fist by a brutal warlord calling himself Sala Jihan. He is far more than a petty dictator, for Jihan holds the fate of nations in his grasp. To save a world slipping into chaos, Jihan must either fall or be controlled.
One secret military organization called Exodus plans to see that this happens. For this mission, they need the best of the best. Unfortunately the man they need is rotting in an almost unassailable foreign prison.
Enter Lorenzo, thief extraordinaire. Lorenzo is now retired, happily married and living in paradise. His Achilles heel: an FBI-agent brother who has gone missing—disappeared into the stronghold of warlord Jihan. Exodus promises to give Lorenzo his chance to rescue his brother if and only if Lorenzo will perform one service for them: break Michael Valentine out of a captivity from which no one has ever emerged alive.
And if Lorenzo can accomplish that—well then, the Crossroads awaits the sword of Exodus.
Ribbon Dance
Written by: Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Cover Artist: David Mattingly
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES April 15, 2025
NEW ENTRY IN THE BEST-SELLING LIADEN UNIVERSE® SERIES
On a world where cake is a necessity it takes the Grid to protect the civilized and the deaf from the dire influences of the ambient and to keep the chaotic Haosa at bay.
Having arrived at recently Dust-bound Colemeno, Trader Padi yos’Galan is essential to Master Trader Shan yos’Galan’s plan to recoup Clan Korval’s fortunes by establishing new routes for the clan’s tradeship. Shan’s inner Healer insists Padi come to terms with her as-yet unplumbed psychic abilities, which might place her in the top tier of dramliz, if she can learn control.
Padi yearns to concentrate on trade, but Colemeno’s fey ambient and deadly long-term politics combine to bring her face-to-face with the Haosa, and in particular with the mysterious and untouchable Tekelia, as Korval’s trade mission’s necessity of a port audit collide with a cruel history of murder, deception, and brutality. Amid the dangers, Padi unexpectedly finds herself eagerly exploring her dramliz side when faced with the unspoken powers of the ambient, the sky-filling energy of the Ribbon Dance, and Tekelia’s mutable eyes.
The Thermopylae Protocol
Written by: David Weber and Jacob Holo
Cover Artist: Kurt Miller
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES April 15, 2025
NEW NOVEL IN THE BEST-SELLING GORDIAN DIVISION SERIES FROM NYT BEST-SELLING AUTHOR DAVID WEBER AND JACOB HOLO: When a ship from an uncharted universe explodes, it soon becomes apparent that someone is building a massive weapon away from the watchful eyes of the Gordian Division. Agent Cho and Detective Cantrell are deployed to get to the bottom of the mystery. If they don’t it, means destruction on a universal scale.
A Time Storm is Brewing.
After an industrial ship carrying advanced self-replicating machines explodes on its way to Mercury, analysis of the wreckage reveals it to be forty years too old. Raibert Kaminski, the Gordian Division’s top agent, and his crew on the TransTemporal Vehicle Kleio soon discover the ship had been transported to an uncharted universe, one with temporarily accelerated time. Forty years passed for the ship’s industrial machines while everyone else experienced only a few short days. Raibert is certain a powerful weapon of some nature has been built out in the unexplored reaches of the multiverse, but where and by whom remains unknown.
The search is on, and the Gordian Division musters its fleet of time machines at Providence, a massive transdimensional station under construction. They call upon their allies from the militaristic Admin for aid in their search—but before plans can be formalized, the leader of the Admin’s Department of Temporal Investigation is murdered while visiting Providence, and the joint operation is thrown into chaos.
Accusations fly and tensions mount between the two organizations. Detectives Isaac Cho and Susan Cantrell—both fast becoming experts in transdimensional crime—are dispatched to Providence. But the clock is ticking for the detectives and Raibert’s crew. A vast, powerful conspiracy has shuddered into motion, and the two teams may be all that stand between it and destruction on a universal scale.
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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