Back in June I wrote a brief piece about Hank Davis’s upcoming Baen anthology Space Pioneers, a collection of new and classic SF tales of space exploration. Hank recently sent me an update on the book, and it keeps looking better and better. In June Baen listed it as 304 pages, but the PDF copy Hank sent me is a whopping 512 pages, packed with fiction by Clifford D. Simak, Poul Anderson, Fredric Brown, Larry Niven, Murray Leinster, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jerry Pournelle, Tony Daniel, and many more.

For a mass market paperback priced at $7.99, this is a real treasure trove. Here’s Hank:

I’m presently proofing the pages for Space Pioneers, coming from Baen around Turkey Day. Figuring you would like to see those pages, I’m passing them on to you, with the warning that this is the virtually unproofed version, so please keep that in mind.

Some of the typos I’ve seen so far, such as “Frederik Brown,” “Lester del Ray,” and other reasons-to-slit-editorial-wrists will be fixed, but I’m sure I’ll miss something until it is in cold, dry, unforgiving print for all the world to see…

And also attached is the nearly final version of the paperback’s wraparound cover. Aside from the back cover and spine now being visible, it differs from the one I sent you a few months back in having Robert A. Heinlein’s name on the front, replacing Jerry Pournelle, who will now be on the back cover. If it isn’t too late (and I won’t know that until the survivors return from DragonCon), I’m going to add Clifford D. Simak to the names on the back cover.

Hank’s co-editor for the project is Christopher Ruocchio, whose first anthology for Baen was Star Destroyers, (co-edited with Tony Daniel), and whose debut novel Empire of Silence has been getting lots of acclaim.

Here’s a peek at the updated table of contents for Space Pioneers.

Hank has done more to keep classic SF alive in affordable mass market format than any other living SF editor. His recent titles include:

The Best of the Bolos: Their Finest Hour (2010)
A Cosmic Christmas (2012)
A Cosmic Christmas 2 You (2013)
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (2013)
The Baen Big Book of Monsters (2014)
As Time Goes By (2015)
Future Wars … and Other Punchlines (2015)
Worst Contact (2016)
Things from Outer Space (2016)
If This Goes Wrong… (2016)
The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1 (2017)
Space Pioneers, edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Space Pioneers will be published by Baen Books on November 27, 2018. It is 512 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback. The cover is by Bob Eggleton (probably).

See all our recent coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy and SF here.