Did you know that Baen Books offers free teaching guides for many of our books? These guides can be used by teachers, homeschoolers, and more to dive deep into learning with Baen! Kevin Ikenberry’s The Crossing, which comes out this month, will be getting the teaching guide treatment, and to celebrate, we thought we’d offer discounts on all our backlist of novels with teaching guides.

It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that Eric Flint has passed away. We were proud to publish Eric’s first novel, Mother of Demons, in 1997, and to continue publishing his many worlds, including the best-selling Ring of Fire series that started with 1632.

There are several of Eric’s works already delivered and on the schedule. Eric was a tireless collaborator, and readers can also expect more of his works to be released with Eric’s designated collaborators in the future.

We will be celebrating Eric and his works on the Baen Free Radio Hour this week and the following week and encourage all to tune in.

—Toni Weisskopf
Publisher, Baen Books

Baen Books formally announced this year’s finalists for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award earlier this month.

Lakewood, Colorado author Wil McCarthy has been named the winner of the 2022 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, for his novel Rich Man’s Sky.

Mike Kupari is the author of four science fiction novels, from Baen Books, as well as the coauthor, with Larry Correia, of the best-selling Dead Six military adventure series. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and enlisted at the age of seventeen. Kupari has worked as a security contractor with several firms, did a tour in Southwest Asia with a private military company, and is an NRA-certified firearms instructor.

“Trouble Is My Business” is set in the world of his upcoming hardboiled detective science fiction novel, Trouble Walked In, featuring detective Ezekiel “Easy” Novak.

Delta City is one hell of a town. You ever been there? Let me tell you about it. The Big D is the second-largest city on Nova Columbia and the largest in the planet’s northern hemisphere. Situated in a crater some forty miles across, it’s a sprawling megalopolis of thirty million people that never sleeps. It’s constantly churning, constantly busy, twenty-six hours a day, four hundred and one days per local year. The Chamber of Commerce likes to call it The Economic Engine of the Northern Hemisphere, and that’s probably a fair assessment.

You might be asking yourself why we all live in a handful of huge, densely populated cities when we have a whole planet with only ninety million inhabitants. Believe me, it’s not because we enjoy each other’s company that much. Nova Columbia is the only habitable planet in the 18 Scorpii system, and they say it was a perfect candidate for colonization. It has gravity close enough to Earth’s so as to not make any difference, fifty percent of the surface is covered in oceans, and it has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that you can breathe. The native life is primitive and mostly benign.

But while there’s a lot open land on Nova Columbia, most of it is pretty bleak, even barren. The vast continental interiors are rocky, dry, and volcanically active. In many places you have to drill down eight, ten, even twelve thousand feet to hit the water table. There’s no vegetation and the soil lacks many of the basic nutrients needed for agriculture. Land is cheap; useful land is precious. Every year, the terraformed zones get a little bigger, but the process takes a long time.

Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in nuclear engineering and power systems began as a naval officer. Experience after the USN includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).

Borders are all around us, some made by nature, some by man. Below is possibly the most recognizable manmade border of them all, The Great Wall of China.

The Great Wall of China at Jinshanling
Image Credit: Severin.stalder, Wikimedia Commons

But what is a border, when did they begin, and why do we have them?

Elaine Midcoh of Pembroke Pines, Florida, has won the grand prize in the 2022 Jim Baen Memorial Award competition for her short story, “Man on the Moon.”