The Baselines are plucked completely at random from a virtual hat. Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead has won the third annual Baseline Speculative Fiction Award. The Witness for the Dead is a standalone sequel to Addison’s 2014 The Goblin Emperor.
"As a Witness for the Dead, Celehar can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. It is his duty use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered ..."
First runner-up: Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount
Second runner-up: Paul Braddon, The Actuality
Source: The hat was filled up this year with suggestions from the British Science Fiction Association's crowdsourced awards eligibility sheet.