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Hugely popular new meta-hero novels Invasion and upcoming World Divided started their lives as audio drama podcasts produced by Mercedes Lackey and her coauthors. Now in a Baen.com exclusive, listen to a Secret World Chronicle special broadcast a new introduction and material never before heard.
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We email a twice monthly newsletter that announces exclusive new Baen.com content such as original short stories by your favorite Baen writers, scintillating essays and think-pieces by star contributors, and author interviews. This newsletter also provides highlights of monthly releases in Ebooks, hard covers, and paperbacks complete with synopses and links to sample chapters. Click to view the most recent newsletter.
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Tony Daniel, the award-winning author of upcoming Guardian of Night, is also an editor at Baen Books. Daniel reflects on reading, writing, being a Baen editor, and life in science fiction and storytelling.
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We proudly present another in our line of Teacher and Student Guides for Baen books. Here’s a guide for David Drake and John Lambshead’s first book in the new Citizens SF series, Into the Hinterlands.
Click to download this month’s guide
Baen Teacher and Student Guide Catalog
It’s not easy being a soldier far from home, let alone representing your planet to the rest of the Star Kingdom. Below some excerpts from letters home, full of wry insights and commentary on an ensign’s life in the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s Grayson Navy from Cecilie Rustin, who has recently shipped out on her first deep space assignment. The letters become an epistlatory tale in their own right and make for an exciting addition to the Honorverse from long-time David Weber fans and BU9 contributors, Joelle Presby and Thomas Pope.
Grayson Navy Letters Home
by Joelle Presby
[Post to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]
[October 1921]
Everyone, Ladies, and Whoever,
My sister, Ensign Cecelie Rustin, Grayson Navy sent this. Cecelie just got her Grayson Navy commission, and our whole family is super proud of her. She’s quick to point out to us that she isn’t the first at anything, but she’s the only woman I know in our Navy. Sure, I did see Rear Admiral Mercedes Brigham at a lecture once, but that was because Cecelie brought me along with all of our Moms in her campaign to convince the family that she should be allowed to apply for the Academy. Of course Admiral Brigham charmed the Moms and left them absolutely convinced that we all had to go fight what with the threats to the families of Grayson from Masada before and Haven now. The sentiment didn’t last all that long, but it was enough to get the Moms’ support in convincing Father to let her apply to Saganami Island. Her very first ship is the GNS Manasseh, a Joseph-class destroyer, and Cecelie is one of two female officers assigned there. Before she left, she promised our Moms to write every week, and she promised to tell me what is really going on. She really does send the messages on secured comms like she threatened, but I know you’ve all been wondering what it’s really like out there. With Haven finally beaten back, with so many star systems so close by through the Manticore Junction, and with all those interesting counter piracy missions or security patrols possible, maybe you are thinking about trying to join too. At least, I’m thinking about thinking about it. So anyway, I’m just retyping this up for you and uploading.
Don’t forward. Cecelie would freak.
-Suleia
Brain scientist Tedd Roberts feels inspired, intrigued and, at times, dismayed by the portrayal of science in science fiction. Yet Roberts remains an inveterate SF reader and here provides checkpoints—and even a few recommendations—for the appreciation of plausible and wonder-inducing science in a great SF novel.
Putting the Science in Science Fiction
by Tedd Roberts
Thirty-five years ago I entered college with a plan: I would major in pre-med, go to medical school, study neurosurgery and specialize in bionics.
It was 1976 and The Six Million Dollar Man had been on TV for two years. I was a big Science Fiction fan, helped along by a high school librarian that allowed me to read all of the new acquisitions before they hit the general circulation. I discovered Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels almost at the same time as the TV show it inspired. I was especially taken with the fourth novel Cyborg IV in which the astronaut/test pilot/cyborg Steve Austin directly connects his bionics to the controls of an experimental space shuttle in one of the earliest science fictional descriptions of brain-machine interfacing I'd encountered.
I knew that this was the field for me. I loved SF, I loved computers. Throughout my high school years I was a science and math nerd, participating in interscholastic math and science competitions (the "Nerd Olympics" as my colleagues would later call them). I was programming computers in the 9th grade (1972) even before there were computers available for most students to even see, let alone available for them to use. I knew that I would be one of those people pushing back the frontiers of science into the realm of science fiction.
Boy, did I have a lot to learn.
I didn't go to med school, though; I went to graduate school, and I thought I picked a good one, a college known for engineering, and a professor working on prosthetics. Only it wasn't bionics. It was mundane stuff like ensuring that the artificial joint didn't freeze up. Where was the neural interface? The super strength? The telescopic eyes? The incredibly sensitive hearing?
The problem is that in 1979, none of that stuff existed yet. It was still science fiction. Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man was published in 1972 James P. Hogan utilized brain-machine interfaces in his novels – most notably in The Genesis Machine (1978). Star Trek's Borg were still ten years in the future; The Matrix was twenty years off Yet in 1982, we learned that scientists at Wright State had succeeded in allowing a paralyzed student to walk again. It was a far cry from bionics, though. It involved stimulating the leg muscles, not replacing them, and still required a roomful of computers. Still, it was a start. The first artificial cochlea was approved in 1984. I, and others, could see that a science of bionics was possible, but it wasn't here yet.
Over the course of twenty-nine years, something incredible happened: science fiction became science.
