This story is the winner of the 2020 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award given each year in conjunction with the National Space Society. JBM winning stories highlight a positive vision of humans taking to space. M. T. Reiten served in the military, with deployments to Bosnia and Afghanistan, and works as a scientist at a national lab, proving that there is such a thing as too much research for writing science fiction. He practices aikido, makes pizza, and lives in New Mexico with his beautiful wife and daughter. A Writers of the Future winner, he has published stories in several anthologies, including S. M. Stirling's The Change. He placed third in the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest in 2017 and 2019 before winning the Grand Prize. His website is www.mtreiten.com.

Bagala Devi

Melody Varnam pushed into a gentle arc away from the RB240 explosive applied to the rock inside her asteroid, Bagala Devi. Mel yanked the tether on the drilling laser and let it drift to her gloved hand, satisfied with her preparations. Suddenly the hollowed-out chamber went blurry under her suit lights. Dust hissed and pebbles pinged off her helmet from every direction. On reflex, she checked the explosives planted at the bottom of the chamber. Pristine. A massive shockwave had just passed through Bagala Devi and she hadn't caused it this time.

Mel thumped into the far side of her fresh excavation. She felt another shock and scrambled across the handholds sunk into the chamber wall. The open hatch above was rimmed with red and yellow hoarfrost, the frozen byproducts from her hollowing effort.

She was alone on this rock floating at the L4 point between the tug of Earth and the Moon. If her cargo had somehow detonated, her mission was over. If her prospector ship was damaged, she was dead. No one, except the Objectivity Project, knew she was out here. Mel pulled herself through the open hatchway.

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“Jim Baen would have enjoyed this one a lot,” commented Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf on this essay by Rob Furey. Dr. Rob Furey is a biologist by training whose work was centered around social aspects of spider behavior, but with broad interest in areas of astronomy, physics, geology and forensics. Furey won numerous awards for innovative teaching from both academic and business groups and has worked closely with the Dauphin County Coroner's office as a sworn deputy. He is a professor in Integrative Sciences at Harrisburg University, and serves as assistant provost there. Complimentary activities include director of the environmental education center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, guide and science adviser to a Partridge Films film crew in Equatorial West Africa, and science essays in Aeon Magazine and on Baen.com. He is a graduate science fiction workshop Clarion West, and his fiction has appeared in many anthologies.

Nick Bostrom's trilemma and Simulation Argument

1) "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or

2) "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero", or

3) "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.”

An Existential Conundrum

A short while ago someone suggested that I might be virtual, a computer-generated being inhabiting a computer-generated universe. This guy was from Oxford, so I figured I’d have to give the idea a little thought. And after a little thought I decided he was wrong. And that was after only a little thought.

Baen Books announces the top ten finalists for the 2020 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award for best original fantasy short story.

7/15: Travis S. Taylor, Michael Z. Williamson, Kacey Ezell, & Josh Hayes – BATTLE LUNA

7/22: D.J. Butler – IN THE PALACE OF SHADOW AND JOY

7/29: Charles E. Gannon – AT THE END OF THE WORLD

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Join David Weber, Eric Flint and More in Livestream Showcasing New and Upcoming Books

M.T. Reiten of Los Alamos, New Mexico, has won the grand prize in the 2020 Jim Baen Memorial Award competition for his short story “Bagala Devi Objective.”

Innovative Independent Publisher to Bring Author Readings, Q&As, and Convention-Style Programming to Facebook LIVE

A list of all novels, short stories, and nonfiction pieces published by Baen Books in 2019, which are thereby eligible for most major awards

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