Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration [Hardcover]

Allen Steele (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2002

Coyote marks a dramatic new turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth's first interstellar colonists-and the mysterious planet that becomes their home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At first, this novel from Hugo winner Steele looks like a fairly conventional tale of high-tech intrigue-in this case, rebels against a right-wing American dictatorship plot to steal the prototype interstellar spaceship built to immortalize the government's ideology by planting a colony of fanatics on another star's planet. However, once the freedom seekers arrive on the new world, Coyote, things get a lot more interesting. Coyote is habitable but alien, full of flora and fauna that upset the colonists' easy preconceptions. The young people, in particular, have to find their identities in a dangerous but wonderful environment; their discovery of what they can do individually as well as what they owe to the group nicely illustrates the name the starship's captain, R.E. Lee, has given their settlement: Liberty. That Steele's novel has been stitched together out of a series of short stories has advantages and disadvantages. The jumping around can be repetitious, but it also lets readers see the same events from different angles. By the same token, the narrative doesn't stay with individual characters, especially adults, long enough for the reader to get to know them, but it does give a panorama of the developing community. By the end, when an especially big challenge appears, the colonists are ready to face it confidently. The discovery of a new world is one of SF's most potent themes, and Steele handles it well.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Steele's latest space-advocacy yarn begins late in this century and ends two centuries further on, on the distant planet Coyote. In between comes a fast-moving, vividly detailed, somewhat didactic story of gallant misfits, led by a spaceship captain named Robert E. Lee, fleeing an Earth that has lost its chances because of dictatorship and technophobia. The refugee ship Alabama is a character in its own right, as is Captain Lee, despite his name. Steele cobbles together hardware, people, and the perils of Coyote into a well-balanced whole, with not all the good guys surviving the perils and with most of the not-so-good guys developed into believable people. Reckon this Steele's most ambitious novel yet, in which he attains the level of Heinlein and Poul Anderson in that, howsoever much he preaches, he still gives us a cracking good story that even readers not of the true space-exploration faith will enjoy. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover; 1 edition (November 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441009743
• ISBN-13: 978-0441009749
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #427,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Allen Steele is a science fiction writer with sixteen novels and five collections of short fiction to his credit. His works have received the Hugo, Locus, Seiun, and Science Fiction Weekly awards, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise Awards. His first published story, "Live from the Mars Hotel," was published in 1988, and his first novel, Orbital Decay, was published in 1989. His best-known work is the Coyote series -- Coyote, Coyote Rising, Coyote Frontier, Coyote Horizon, and Coyote Destiny -- and the associative novels set in the same universe: Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and the forthcoming Hex. A graduate of New England College and the University of Missouri, he is a former journalist, and once spent a brief tenure as a Washington correspondent. He was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and dogs.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Heinlein Tribute, October 4, 2002

By 

Arthur W. Jordin (Smyrna, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration (Hardcover)

Coyote (2002) is the first novel in this series. Except for a minor quibble or two, I found this story a pleasure to read.

Allen Steele has previously used themes similar to the near space frontier works of Arthur C. Clarke. Coyote, however, echoes several themes in Robert A. Heinlein's works, including the Second American Revolution and the theft of a starship by political refugees.

The title says Coyote is a novel of interstellar exploration, but it is really a story of a great trek across 46 light years to settle a planet -- OK, a satellite -- in another solar system. Much of the novel concerns the trials and tribulations of two adolescents: Wendy and Carlos. In this sense, Coyote is a coming of age story much like Heinlein's juveniles.

The story starts with the theft of the United Republic Service Ship Alabama by some of its crew and a group of "dissident intellectuals" fired from the Federation Space Agency. Since the ship can cruise at only .2c -- 2/10ths of light speed -- the trip will take 230 years earth time.

After the escape, one crew member -- Comtech Leslie Gillis -- is awakened from biostasis and is not allowed by the ship's AI to return to this preserving state. Gillis spends the next 32 years as the only awakened person on the Alabama. Sometimes sane and other times mad, Gillis leaves behind some mural paintings, an epic novel and a mysterious note.

Upon reaching Coyote, the crew and passengers are awakened from biostasis, encounter the mural and novel (and note), and are much puzzled.

Coyote is habitable, of course, yet greatly different from Earth. The colonist find much strangeness and danger, but are able to adapt.

While the science and technology is very much 21st century, the strongest aspect of this novel is character development. Even his villains are believable. Steele deals realistically with teenage sex and pregnancy among his characters, something that Heinlein was not allowed to do until very late in his career.

The novel ends with a number of loose strings, so I hope that a sequel is forthcoming.

-Arthur W. Jordin

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mislead into buying this book, September 24, 2009

By 

Sean Butler "Programmer in ATL" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Coyote (Kindle Edition)

I'm a fan of science fiction and the wondrous worlds that authors create. This book didn't do that. The basic idea is sending a small band of settlers to another world and starting a colony on a new planet far, far away. A pretty basic plot sci-fi plot to be sure and I looked forward to the action scenes and new creatures.

What this book did was stop all of that sci-fi stuff the second the settlers touched down onto the planet. They started planting crops by hand with rakes and hoes, skinning local animals for new clothing and building canoes to explore their new world. To put it another way, their level of technology all of sudden went back to the 18th century.

This is essentially a historical fiction that takes place on another world. The author makes no effort to address any of this and instead focuses on a bunch of characters that are very illogical and pretty whiny.

If you are looking for a sci-fi book with cool toys and action scenes, stay away. Personally, I'd reclassify this as a western.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Book....yet...., October 25, 2010

By 

Debbie - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Coyote (Paperback)

Unlike other reviewers who rated this book one star I am not much of a scientist. In fact, most of the science in science fiction goes right over my head. Don't avoid this book because it's bad science...avoid it because it's bad.

The plot lumbers all over the place, dropping hints of plot developments that never transpire: like the fungus they were worried about when they woke up from biostasis. I thought that was going to be a problem...nope...never mentioned again. The 30 % drop in food supplies? Apparently not an issue after all.

Also, I just gotta ask...subsistence farming...and the ability to do DNA testing? I think I'd have the left the equipment for DNA testing behind and brought a rototiller (maybe that's just me though).

They never lock the doors because there is no theft. Huh? Didn't I just slog through a couple a hundred pages dealing with a bunch of stupid teenagers stealing everything in sight? And when Carlos finally comes back the writer states that most of the stolen items were quietly returned - didn't half that stuff end up on the bottom of the river?

I could go on and on about instances where the author didn't even bother to check his own writing to make sure what he said made sense but you get the picture.

I'll end with a silly thing that probably shouldn't have bugged me but did. The overuse of the word "yet". After a while I couldn't even concentrate on what I was reading anymore, I was so busy bracing for the next "yet". It drove me crazy. I read Coyote on my kindle so I had my kindle count how many times "yet" was used in the book: 338 times. The Pillars of the Earth, a book twice as long as Coyote, used the word "yet" 147 times. Other books, comparable in size to Coyote, used it between 40 and 50 times. And yet, Steele felt the need to use "yet" 338 times, yet one more instance of sloppy lazy writing, yet one that bothered me perhaps more than it should have.

Bad writing. Bad Book.