Customer Reviews

Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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

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.

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.

I'm a sucker for stories about the colonization of new worlds, so Coyote was right up my alley. Making the arduous journey, exploring the planet, surviving against the odds - it's familiar territory, but it's still good stuff. Steele is a competent writer, with smooth prose and an ear for dialogue. He has some interesting ideas, as well. All in all, it made for an enjoyable read.

But not an altogether satisfying one. Steele sets the stage nicely, but he doesn't take his ideas far enough. Both the world and the story seem... undercooked. We are constantly reminded that "Coyote is not Earth," but the differences are basically superficial: the trees and birds look different, the seasons are longer, and so on. There is only one dangerous native species, and after one encounter, they learn how to keep it at bay. With a blank canvas to play with, Steele paints Coyote as too safe and familiar; it's as if the settlers landed in Australia rather than an alien planet. I expected more.

The same incompleteness applies to the colonists and their story. The group has their inevitable conflicts and setbacks, but those too are relatively tame. The social dividing lines are clear, but the expected power struggle fizzles out harmlessly. You never genuinely fear for the well-being of the colony.

Bottom line, I enjoyed Coyote enough to order the sequel. However, I can't help feeling that if Steele had just taken it a bit farther, made the world more exotic, developed the characters, heightened the tension, that this could have been a great story rather than a decent one.

I've always been a sucker for sci-fi colonization stories and despite the tepid reviews for this book I put it on my wish list and got it for xmas. If it wasn't for the fact that it was a gift I don't think that I would have finished it as all of the silly science reviews that you see posted here are right on the money.

I haven't even seen the most ridiculous sequence mentioned where they discover one of the locals sending the towns coordinates up to the newly arrived spaceship from earth after they have already communicated via radio transmission. Wouldn't it be a fairly safe bet that a starship that could travel at .95 the speed of light would be able to pinpoint the source of transmission on a planet half the size of earth? Maybe the evil Progressive Marxist regime that replaced the evil Right Wing Conservative regime on future earth banned the use of telescopes or signal triangulation from outer space. I suppose stranger things could happen. Like an oppressive Tea Party like regime in the late 21st Century naming a space ship after their favorite rascist state and their most feared political internment camp after Pat Buchannan. I'm a lifelong Progressive Democrat and even I was offended!

This book was almost anti-speculative in it's delivery and the politics, at both ends of the spectrum, are heavy handed and beyond simplistic. Maddeningly, most of the adults seem to fade away from the narrative after they arrive on Coyote and a series of embarrassingly written teenage angst and stupidity among the stars vignettes take over. But if that's your cup of tea then hit the "Add to cart" button immediately. It appears that there are at least 4 or 5 sequels to this book. Not that I have any intention of finding out, but surely the story and writing must get better...?

Allen Steele looks like a nice guy and all, there's a swell picture of him and his dog inside the back cover and I hope this review does not come across as an assault on his worth as a human being. Perhaps my 50+ years of reading science fiction has glazed over my brain and I'm missing something. My best guess though is that the only thing I'm missing is the common sense to believe the disproportionate number of negative reviews on books like this. Live and learn...

Dave Hoeltje

The author created a distinctive and potentially interesting setting for a new world to settle - a huge moon orbiting a gas giant - but failed to consider its physics in his story. Most glaringly, he has characters blithely pull up small boats and camp overnight right on the shores of a sea-sized "river" - which would actually be subject to daily tides on the order of 1000 feet, ensuring their certain demise in their sleep. The writer had a certain romantic notion of a story in mind, and lacked the integrity to write a different (and probably more interesting) story when physics didn't support it.

Neither the author nor characters seems to have ever heard of "planning". They land at the first convenient spot that a shuttle pilot picks *in flight* to the landing. The post-landing activities are directed off-the-cuff with no established priorities. They land with *no idea* of how they are going to govern themselves.

The characters are foolish and deserve the grim fate their planet will mete out to them. Most annoyingly, some teens deliberately sabotage essential equipment incidental to an unauthorized escapade. Because the equipment is essential and irreplaceable, and there is a great risk the teens will never return with the information needed to correct the damage they left behind, this "prank" is truly a potential death sentence for the entire colony. But when they return and fess up, they are not even punished. At all. On a *real* frontier, they would face some serious punishment, maybe exile or worse - how can the community possibly trust these fools in the future?

The overall work is a choppy collection of three novellas, but each has a good narrative flow and is easy enough to read - especially the middle part, which also lacks the major flaws I've noted. This is definitely a writer to watch - if he gets past the cliche story to actually explore the worlds he imagines, he will give us some good work in the future.

But this one, you can skip.

PS. Note how many of the favorable reviews start with something like "I don't read a lot of SF but I like this...". Exactly. In contrast, I have been an avid SF reader for 40 years, and rest assured, this is NOT good science fiction.

#1 Harriet, of course, has beaten everyone to summarize the book, but I think some other criticisms here aren't fair.

I really don't understand the reaction of the previous reviewer to Allen Steele's politics. Yes, a lot of Allen Steele makes me believe he's a pro-union, 1950s, Harry Truman-style Democrat. I doubt Steele and I would agree on much, but his politics are open and clear. He makes a dig at Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms. So what -- are we Republicans that thin-skinned? I'm not.

Secondly, the idea that this is just "Legacy of Heorot" is silly. Legacy... a brilliant book... was a story about a bad alien with stranging mating habits (something Niven himself mentions in the acknowledgments to Legacy. Coyote is a story about -people- colonizing a new world. If there are similiarities from that, it's only because Steele, like the authors of "Legacy" did his homework.

I would have loved a tad more of Steele's excellent visual descriptions --- the gas giant around which Coyote orbits is mentioned a handful of times, but I never grew tired of the descriptions.

Are his politics distracting to the story? Not at all. Is the story worth reading? Darn tooting! Does this story ring true, does it hang together, is it entertaining? Absolutely.

I went into this book expecting something like a Heinlein juvenile, e.g. 'Red Planet', 'Starman Jones', 'Farmer in the Sky', etc. which I always enjoyed. I was willing to look past a political message (God knows Heinlein always had one) and to let slide a couple of foolish technology assessments (again Heinlein was guilty of a more than a few astrogators working their slide rules...) and enjoy a medium-hard SF/adventure story.

Wow. This book is awful. The author strikes a nearly impossible chord of providing just enough information to make his constructed universe irrational and inconsistent. Fewer details and some hand waving, and this could be a decent SF adventure story. But if you're going to give details they have to make sense. Many times I fought the urge to put the book down, in the hope that it would redeem itself, and each time it got worse.

The science, the technology and the future history are either silly and childish, inconsistent or utterly irrational. There is not a single deep idea in the book, and the characters are just as shallow.

Steele has no respect for his readers. Assuming he is not a stupid man, he (and his editors) must believe that we are.

I'm a sucker for a good space/planetary exploration story, and I've enjoyed Allen Steele's writing in the past, so I began COYOTE anticipating a good read. Alas, it didn't really live up to my expectations. The book starts off with a right-wing regime in control of the southeastern US and a group of dissidents hijacking Earth's first interstellar colony ship in order to escape. The book goes on to detail the events of the voyage to the new planet, dubbed "Coyote", and the first few years of the new colony.

All this might have worked well enough, but the story is actually cobbled together from several short stories. As a result, the focus of the book shifts from one central character to another as it moves from one storyline to the next. As a whole, COYOTE has an episodic feel to it, and the benefit of seeing events from more than one viewpoint is wasted as key early players are left to become secondary characters later on.
Rather than arousing sympathy, conflicts among the characters came across as petty and annoying. In the end, I found myself not caring overly much what happened to any of them.

COYOTE is apparently the first book of a trilogy. On that basis there's hope that the other installments will turn out to be more coherent and compelling than this one. It's not that it was a bad read, just that it wasn't especially good, either. As a standalone, I wouldn't recommend it. If the entire trilogy turns out to be entertaining, then this one's worth the effort. As things stand, the jury's still out.

The first question that Amazon asked when typing this review was whether I am over 13.

I find it an extremely apt question.

I can give this book two scores, based on the age of readers. Either a 4 for a 'rousing', tolerably well-written (for a children's book) and slightly thought-provoking children's book. Or I can give it one stars for a book that has a mature sci-fi reader shaking his head at every single turn of page. Perhaps not shaking, perhaps banging his head against a shelf of well-written sci-fi books.

I'm sure children and teenagers will be engaged by this book and will enjoy it immensely.

That said, they'd prefer Heinlein.

I find it astonishing that this book was written only a couple of years ago.

This is not a book that was written, in spirit, in the 21st century. Heinlein was writing better books, in the exact wagons-to-the-stars vein half a century ago. The 'inspiration' is obvious.

Adults will be driven to frustration by one-dimensional characters, awful science, barely concealed political frustration, unoriginal plots, pandering to children and the absolute stupidity of plot events and character behaviour.

A couple of examples of stupidity includes a laughable plot to steal a spaceship, a spaceship arriving to colonize a planet with no idea what to expect (so if the planet was hostile, the colonists would presumably have been doomed to eating each other in orbit), that spaceship being full of 'scientists' (a very 50s expectation) because agricultural experts were not foreseen, a planet with edible organisms that did not evolve from shared DNA (unexplainable), Marxist superhumans arriving to take over a planet (they have super-fast propulsion systems and cyborgs but forgot to take their food with them) and perhaps the most insulting part of all, a plot development in which a treacherous colonist reveals the colony location to the super-communists by sending them its location by radio. I can see my car parked on my street via Google Earth and I expect those that use zero-point energy could probably read the contents of this computer from orbit and they do not need traitors to find a primitive settlement on a planet.

Help, my brain is imploding from this childish sci-fi!