"Talk Girl" is set within the world of Wil McCarthy’s novel Antediluvian, out in October 2019 from Baen Books. McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel, where his "Lab Notes" column ran for ten years. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age, and his novels include Bloom, The Collapsium (a national bestseller), and To Crush the Moon. He has also written for TV, and appeared on the History Channel and the Science Channel. In addition to fiction and journalism, McCarthy also writes patents for a top law firm in Dallas.

My machine was different than Harv Leonel's. Extracting the quantum memories that cling to highly conserved biological structures . . . well, it's a dicey business under the best of circumstances, and Leonel was plucking the very lowest-hanging fruit from that tree. For the rest of us, he left either scraps beneath the table or luscious morsels far out of reach. Not that his journey was an easy one, or free of costs. Certainly not. And yet, in being first he was, in many ways, the mnemochronnaut with the least to prove. Which is a funny thing, if you think about what happened afterward.

The Ice Age he claims to have traveled back to is corroborated here and there by archeological or linguistic or genetic evidence, and our very cultural notions of those time periods are increasingly shaped by his experience. Who hasn't seen the CGI landscape reconstructions from National Geographic? Heard the lilt and jabber of the ancient languages he claims to have spoken? Who hasn't watched the movie, with Sidney Smith playing all five title roles?

And yet, nearly half of Real Scientists consider Leonel a crank, and his staff a team of either world-class chumps or third-rate charlatans.

"Are you ready, Beth?" Shirley asked me as I leaned back in the seizure chair. We were in my garage, heaped high with second-hand and scratch-built equipment. Was I ready?

What a question.

Kerry Hensley is a native of West Virginia and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Boston University. She is a writer for the award-winning research news website AAS Nova as well as Astrobites, a graduate-student-run research blog. Her essay recounting her time at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, "Quiet Zone," received awards for both Nonfiction and Emerging Writers Prose in the West Virginia Writers Annual Writing Contest. After graduating from Williams College in 2014 with a BA in Astrophysics and Chinese, she was a planetary science intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Nan’ao, Taiwan, where she attempted to convince 200 indignant elementary schoolers that Pluto is not a planet.

After centuries of watching the night sky with increasingly sophisticated tools, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the universe. Part of the challenge is that we’re stuck on a planet that’s surrounded by an atmosphere that blocks certain types of radiation from reaching the ground. It’s hard to complain too much, since if X-rays could make it to Earth’s surface humans would either be dead or a very different kind of organism, but it has certainly slowed our progress. We’ve managed to launch telescopes into orbit around Earth to observe most wavelengths of light, but there’s a huge chunk of extraterrestrial radiation that we currently have no means to observe. The culprit? A layer of plasma in Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.

Over 170 titles from Baen Books to be published as audiobooks over the next three years

Baen Ebooks is proud to announce an agreement to distribute the English translation of Judgment in Moscow by Vladimir Bukovsky on its retail ebook site, as well as offering a selection of other ebooks from Judgment in Moscow publisher, Ninth of November Press.

J. J. Cragun takes home the top prize for his short story “Treason Properly.”

Matt McHugh of New Jersey has won the grand prize in the 2019 Jim Baen Memorial Award competition for his short story "Burners."

Baen Begins Selling Challenge Coins Through Baen.com