The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley by Assorted Baen authors, Barflies Page B

further word of advice, we do not leave personal voice logs. But fortunately, in this case, we didn’t have to have a major Article Thirty-Two investigation when Chief Buckley was found a-Dutchman in the main bay. The point of this anecdote is check your seals. Check your navopak . . .”

Ryk E. Spoor:
    The Non-Deaths of Joe Buckley
    “Dear God, I’m going to die,” muttered Joe Buckley, as the SUV bounced from one rutted pothole to another.

    This was the opening line of Boundary , the first in a trilogy of hard SF novels written by me (Ryk Spoor) and Eric Flint, starting in 2006. When we began Boundary we were of course already well aware of the tradition of Baen authors trying to one-up each other in devising ever more spectacular ways to arrange Joe’s demise.
    Eric and I essentially simultaneously decided that we were not going to kill Joe. We were going to hurt Joe. After all, once he dies , how can we have more fun with him (barring cheating and going to AI replication or cloning, both out of the technological capabilities of the Boundary setting)?
    Thus, in Boundary , Joe has several near misses:

One mentioned in the past, where he apparently nearly killed himself and a company vehicle offroading into an arroyo
One upon re-entry of the shuttle Chinook (almost killing off Bruce Irwin at the same time)
One when John Carter crashes on Mars
One when a cave-in almost brings down a Bemmie base on his head

    But we were far from done with Joe Buckley, oh no. In the sequel to Boundary , Threshold , Joe and the rest of the crew depart from Mars to Ceres, and then end up in pursuit of the gigantic EU vessel Odin in a resurrected alien vessel named Nebula Storm . And along the way, we almost kill Joe by:

Shooting him with a battleship-sized coilgun
Making his air run out while he was lost down a crater on Ceres
Blowing holes in Nebula Storm with a gigantic shrapnel round (this of course almost killed everyone else on the ship, but hey, don’t hang out with Joe if you don’t want mortal peril)
Crashlanding Nebula Storm on Europa

    But wait, there’s more! This was a trilogy, after all, so we had to serve up a few more moments of Buckley peril, which we did by:

Blowing a hole in his spacesuit from a piece of a collapsing drill rig
Almost crushing him during a Europaquake that collapsed the floor beneath him and the vehicle he was in
Having the vehicle trapped under the ice of Europa
The vehicle being assaulted by a huge Europan lifeform
Springing a leak and almost ending up drowned or crushed

    On the positive side, though, Joe did live through it all reasonably intact, and ended up the love interest for the most incredibly talented, resourceful, and of course beautiful member of the cast, secret agent Madeline Fathom. There are many men who would consider that a small price to pay for her high regard; hopefully he’ll forgive us our little jests.

    The Happy Death of Joe Buckley
    In Paradigms Lost , the vastly expanded and revised version of my first novel Digital Knight , I have not only put in supplemental material, but added two new adventures of the protagonist Jason Wood. The last of these, “Trial Run,” puts Jason in the unenviable position of having to help defend a werewolf from a murder charge. During the same time, he is handed another puzzle to solve . . . one in which a number of other bodies have turned up, including the body of one Joe Buckley, whose death turns out to have been most pleasant . . . and a key to solving the mystery.

Paradigms Lost
    RYK E. SPOOR
    “Just . . . it doesn’t quite work for me. James was a little farther away; a little off from where I’d have expected him to be in that scenario. And you don’t do much moving after a thirty-eight slug ricochets around your brainpan. Times of death seemed a little off, almost as though Jessie had kicked off a little bit before James, which would make it kind of hard for her to have done any shooting. The TOD estimates are always wide