Orbital Decay
A hard-SF short story by Malory, awarded the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and published at Baen.com.
About the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award
The Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award is Baen Books' annual prize for forward-looking science fiction, run in partnership with the National Space Society. It was founded to honour the late publisher Jim Baen and recognise the kind of grounded, future-facing storytelling he championed throughout his career.
Entries are judged by the Baen editorial team. The winning story is published at Baen.com at professional rates, and the winner is recognised at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC). Previous winners have gone on to careers across the field, from short fiction to novel-length work with Baen and other major houses.
The 2026 prize was announced in March 2026; the ceremony takes place at ISDC in McLean, Virginia, 4–7 June 2026.
About the Story
Orbital Decay
A hard-SF short set against the long, slow problem the title suggests — when something built to stay up starts coming down, and the people responsible for it have to decide what to do about it.
The full story is available to read free at Baen.com.
Read Orbital Decay at Baen.comI'll write more about Orbital Decay — the idea behind it, what I was trying to do, what the editors caught that I didn't — closer to the ISDC ceremony in June. In the meantime, if you want the kind of monster-trapped-with-people story I keep coming back to, that's exactly what the free Crude novella is.
Press & Coverage
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