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 August releases.
Freelancers of Neptune
Written by: Jacob Holo
Cover Artist: Sam R. Kennedy
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES October 1, 2024
All he wanted was a simple job to make ends meet. What he got was a mysterious cat girl, a shot at a hoard of treasure, and a whole lot of trouble.
The Solar System ain’t what it used to be!
In the far distant future, Saturn’s rings are gone, Mercury is a gas giant, and Earth is remembered only as a unit of measure. Nearly godlike AIs reshaped the Solar System in eons past, but they too are now nothing more than a fading memory.
Captain Nathaniel Kade cares for none of that. He’s but a simple freelancer from the orbital ring of Neptune, struggling to make ends meet and to keep his understaffed spaceship from falling apart. All he wants is a decent, uneventful job to help put his finances back in order.
What he receives instead is Vessani S’Kaari, a mysterious and beautiful cat girl who tried—and failed—to steal a ship belonging to a band of space pirates. Vessani’s in over her head and is clearly more trouble than she’s worth, but she also has a lead on what may be the greatest treasure trove of lost technology the Solar System has ever seen.
Nathan pulls her butt out of the fire, and together they begin to assemble a team to seek out this long-lost bounty. But other interested parties have their eyes on the same prize; the Jovian Everlife has dispatched a fleet of warships with one of their elite, many-bodied agents in command, and he’d like a few words with Nathan and his new crewmember.
1635: The Weaver’s Code
Written by: Eric Flint and Jody Lynn Nye
Cover Artist: Tom Kidd
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES October 1, 2024
NEW RING OF FIRE SERIES ENTRY FROM THE LATE ERIC FLINT AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR JODY LYNN NYE
With her family’s finances in a downward spiral and taxes threatening, Margaret de Beauchamp is in London as her family’s emissary to the Earl of Cork, the king’s chancellor. While waiting for an audience, she decides to indulge her curiosity and visit the new “up-timers,” ambassadors originally from somewhere called West Virginia, and reportedly “the future.” They are imprisoned in the Tower of London, but are able to entertain visitors, becoming the latest curiosity of the fashionable set. An escape plan is in place, but vital parts are missing. Margaret might be able to make Harry Lefferts’s wild scheme possible. Agreeing to assist the charming rogue, she finds herself ever more involved with the up-timers, visiting Magdeburg and bringing back technology that could save her family and the entire wool trade from the chancellor’s greed. But all of England is in chaos with mercenaries everywhere and the crown stealing estates all over the North. By introducing aqualator computers to save the wool trade and weavers, the young gentlewoman and her new up-timer allies find themselves threatened by spies, raiders, and even pirates.
Shadow of the Smoking Mountain
Written by: Howard Andrew Jones
Cover Artist: Dave Seeley
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES October 1, 2024
NEW ENTRY IN THE CHRONICLES OF HANUVAR SERIES. DESTINED TO BE A CLASSIC OF THE GENRE. CONAN THE BARBARIAN MEETS HANNIBAL OF CARTHAGE.
He had crossed half a continent, venturing into the heartland of his enemies to wage a secret war of liberation!
It almost seemed that the worst lay behind them. Hanuvar and his small band of allies had faced down warriors and horrors and sinister magics to free hundreds of their people from slavery. The emperor was dead, and his successor had so little interest in finding Hanuvar, he’d ordered his sorcerous revenants to cease their search and turn their sinister talents to other targets.
But as Hanuvar shifted his efforts south, where hundreds of his people still labored under the Dervan yoke, other forces were advancing agendas of their own. Determined to prove Hanuvar still lived, the revenant legate secretly sought him with dark sorceries. A band of gladiators had rebelled and now wandered free, threatening the innocent and calling down the wrath of the legions. And upon the slopes of an ancient volcano, an ageless warrior mage worked to unleash a spell that would doom them all . . .
My Brother’s Keeper
Written by: Tim Powers
Cover Artist: Eric Williams
Format: Paperback
RELEASES October 1, 2024
THE TRUE STORY OF THE BRONTË SISTERS AS ONLY TIM POWERS COULD WRITE IT.
This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.
When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.
But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.
In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.
Honor Harrington: The Honor of the Queen
Written by: David Weber
Cover Artist: David Mattingly
Maps: Eleanor Kostyk
Format: Paperback
RELEASES October 1, 2024
Book 2 in the internationally best-selling Honor Harrington science fiction series. First time in Trade Paperback!
It’s hard to give peace a chance when the other side regards conquest as the only option and a sneak attack as the best means to that end. That’s why the Kingdom of Manticore needs allies against the Republic of Haven—and the planet Grayson is strategically situated to make a very good ally indeed. But Her Majesty’s Foreign Office overlooked a “minor cultural difference” when they chose Honor Harrington to carry the flag: women on the planet of Grayson are without rank or rights and Honor’s mere presence is an intolerable affront to every male on the planet. At first Honor doesn’t take it personally; where she comes from gender discrimination is barely a historical memory, right up there in significance with fear of the left-handed. But in time such treatment becomes taxing and she makes plans to withdraw, until Grayson’s fratricidal sister planet attacks without warning. Now, Honor must stay and prevail, not just for her honor, but for her sovereign’s—for the honor of the Queen.
Light of the Veil
Written by: Richard Fox
Cover Artist: Dominic Harman
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES September 24, 2024
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.
Plan B
Written by: Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Cover Artist: Sam R. Kennedy
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES September 24, 2024
A CLASSIC OF THE LIADEN UNIVERSE®
Plan B is now in effect!
Wanted fugitives Val Con yos’Phelium and Miri Robertson have jumped from the frying pan directly into the fire, hotly pursued by friends, family, and the nefarious Department of the Interior. While the duo make the risky dash for Lytaxin, seeking safety among Miri’s kin, the Department is moving on Val Con’s family, Clan Korval, intending to subvert or destroy it.
Understanding their danger, Korval’s first speaker invokes Plan B, ordering Clan members to scatter to prearranged safe-places.
Meanwhile, Miri and Val Con discover that Lytaxin may not be the safe harbor they had supposed . . . and that Miri’s retirement from the mercenaries may have been premature.
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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