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 October releases.
Gold Dust
Written by: Catherine Asaro
Cover Artist: Kurt Miller
Format: Hardcover
RELEASES October 7, 2025
BORN TO RUN; BORN TO FIGHT
BORN TO RUN, BORN TO FIGHT
DUST KNIGHTS COMPETE IN THE OLYMPIC GAMES
The worlds of three interstellar civilizations vie for honors in the Olympics. The more populous worlds have always dominated the Games. The team from Raylicon, a dying world of scorching temperatures, has never won honors.
But Mason, the coach for the Raylicon track and field team, makes a startling discovery: in the Undercity, a place where crushing poverty exists alongside a culture of dramatic beauty, a group of spectacular runners has existed for millennia.
The Dust Knights are the best of those marvels. With the help of Major Bhajaan, an Undercity native, Mason recruits the Knights. The Undercity faces a civilization they’ve never trusted, one that sees them as barely even human. Now, they must all learn to work together.
The Imperialate of Skolia needs the Undercity to trust them—for hidden within its enigmatic population is one of humanity’s greatest resources. Their population has a uniquely large concentration of Kyle operators. Kyles can do more than run; only they have the neurological makeup needed to utilize a vital technology, one that gives Skolia its sole advantage over their enemies. The army needs the Kyles, but after centuries of being despised and left to die by the rest of humanity, the Undercity wants nothing to do with them.
Until Angel, one of the top runners among the Knights, joins the Kyle Corps—and dives into a world of neurological marvels, including star-spanning networks that access a dimension with dramatically different laws than our space-time universe.
THE STAKES COULD NOT BE HIGHER AS THE DUST KNIGHTS COMPETE FOR THEIR WORLD—AND THE FREEDOM OF HUMANITY
The Familiar Spirit
Written by: DJ Butler & Aaaron Michael Ritchey
Cover Artist: Dan dos Santos
Format: Paperback
RELEASES October 21, 2025
A new novel in the Cunning Man series from Dragon Award-nominated author D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey.
Cunning man Hiram Woolley and his son Michael carry an itinerant preacher across the border into Mexico. Hiram is haunted by the specter of a bloody-faced man that stalks him in his dreams, but also by doubts about what lies ahead in the Mormon colonies around Nuevo Casas Grandes—this is the country Hiram’s father fled to when he abandoned young Hiram and his mother.
In the colonies, Hiram and Michael are dragged into investigating an impossible murder. They track the killer across a land haunted by robbers, by its history of oppression and revolution, by ancient conflict and modern racial strife, and by the insanity that flows from loneliness and exile. They battle bandits and also an elusive ghostmaster who blights the land with the spirits of the uneasy dead.
But before the killer can be brought to justice, Hiram will learn that the most haunting thing of all is family.
Rebel
Written by: David Weber and Richard Fox
Cover Artist: David Mattingly
Format: Paperback
RELEASES October 21, 2025
Book two in David Weber and Richard Fox’s Ascent to Empire series.
HE NEVER WANTED TO BE A REBEL
The Five Hundred, the elite families who rule the Terran Federation, control its political power and its wealth, and they’ve grown steadily wealthier and more powerful, thanks to the war against the Terran League. War may be hard on the people who get caught in its path, but it’s very good for business, in the short term, and the Five Hundred own the shipyards that build the Navy’s ships. They own virtually all the industry that produces the weapons and matériel the war consumes so voraciously . . . and they’ve made damn sure someone else does the dying.
True, there are a few flies in the Five Hundred’s ointment.
There’s the growing hatred and resentment of the Fringe Worlds, whose children do eighty percent of the dying in the Five Hundred’s war. But the Five Hundred have made sure the Fringe knows what will happen to any system that goes ”out of compliance.”
There are the lunatic conspiracy nuts who insist that the alien Rishathan Sphere is secretly aiding the League’s military, but the Five Hundred have forced them to keep their mouths shut where it matters.
And then there’s Terrence Murphy, a man of honor who loves the Federation, who springs from the Five Hundred, yet knows it for what it is and is determined to speak for its victims. But the five hundred have dispatched ample force to deal with him and his handful of lunatic followers.
Unfortunately, the Fringe has paid enough of its children’s lives, and it no longer cares what may happen if it dares to defy the Five Hundred.
Worse, the lunatic conspiracy nuts were right, and the Rish have planned carefully for the Federation’s destruction.
And, worst of all, the Five Hundred have fatally underestimated Terrence Murphy.
1635: The Weavers Code
Written by: Eric Flint and Jody Lynn Nye
Cover Artist: Tom Kidd
Format: Mass Market Paperback
RELEASES September 30, 2025
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.
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!
PopCultHQ.com is an affiliate and will make a small percentage off sales on this site.
