Coyote

Rating:
Summary: rousing tale of revolutionaries starting over on a new plane
Review: In the twenty-third century, the United States is no longer the home of the free. In fact it is no longer the United States since Pacifica and the New England states are separate nations. What is left of the once proud country is the United Republic of America, a fascist right wing country ruled by the Liberty Party. It is a nation where dissidents are placed in reeducation camps and the party's young are encouraged to enroll in youth hostels where they are indoctrinated to believe the propaganda as gospel truth.

As a testament to it's glory, the party has funded the starship Alabama, a one hundred billion dollar space ship that is to send one hundred supporters to colonize a habitable planet. Thanks to the bravery of key personnel the ship is successfully skyjacked by dissidents who plan to form a colony based on the radical concept of democracy. So begins the story of the Founding fathers and mothers.

COYOTE is a rousing tale of revolutionaries starting over on a new planet much the way the pilgrims started over in the New World. The characters are well drawn, complex and totally believable as they escape a police state to pioneer an uncharted planet. Allen Steele has written a fine work that appeals to the patriotic spirit.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Not very good....
Review: It appears that Steele doesn't know much about biology, ecology, or physics for that matter. Although the book is somewhat entertaining, it's a bit frustrating while reading when Steele failed (pretty bad, I might add) at illustrating the ecology of Coyote. There are a lot of things that do not make sense on Coyote. Granted Coyote is a fictional moon, which has a different ecology than Earth and organisms that we do not see on Earth, but it lacks a diversity of life to support an ecosystem. For example, there aren't enough animals on Coyote to have a food chain. What do the boids feed on? How do they get so big? There aren't intermediate predatory animals? There are other flaws throughout the book and too many to mentioned. Whoever the editor that edited his book didn't do a very good job at catching these flaws.

Rating:
Summary: A very good read
Review: It is evident that this is less of a novel than a collection of short stories, this however doesn't detract from enjoying the stories. Some of the concepts are standard sci-fi stuff, but presented with unique twists that made it all worthwhile. I have reccomended this to several friends and would make the reccomendation again.

Rating:
Summary: Great Fiction, Poor Science
Review: Many of the criticisms below of the science in "Coyote" are well deserved. Here are a few additional points: 1) Although Steele tells us that Coyote is not tidally locked with the gas giant, he always has the gas giant rise at sunset. Try figuring that one out! (It only works if a day is about the same length as a year.) 2) He tells us that seasons are driven by the eccentricity of the giant's orbit, but then refers to "the winter solstice." He should instead be talking about "the winter aphelion." Also, the menagerie populating Coyote is disappointingly and unbelievably sparse. Surely, there are more plants, more animals, more diversity on any living planet than he describes. (And surely they would look a lot less earth-like than he describes.)

So, don't read this book for the science. However, Steele's strength has always been his understanding of humans under stress. Steele loves to place his characters in impossibly difficult situations (political, economic, social, physical) and see how they respond. The human side of his characters always rings true. The section on Gillis awakened early is stunning in its simplicity, its insight into humanity, and its aching realism. I will never forget that chapter! Regardless of whether there would be four teenagers, and only four teenagers, in a colony, he does a great job revealing to us how teenagers respond to stressful social dynamics.

A highly memorable book! I can't wait for the sequal.

Rating:
Summary: Great Fiction, Poor Science
Review: Many of the criticisms below of the science in "Coyote" are well deserved. Here are a few additional points: 1) Although Steele tells us that Coyote is not tidally locked with the gas giant, he always has the gas giant rise at sunset. Try figuring that one out! (It only works if a day is about the same length as a year.) 2) He tells us that seasons are driven by the eccentricity of the giant's orbit, but then refers to "the winter solstice." He should instead be talking about "the winter aphelion." Also, the menagerie populating Coyote is disappointingly and unbelievably sparse. Surely, there are more plants, more animals, more diversity on any living planet than he describes. (And surely they would look a lot less earth-like than he describes.)

So, don't read this book for the science. However, Steele's strength has always been his understanding of humans under stress. Steele loves to place his characters in impossibly difficult situations (political, economic, social, physical) and see how they respond. The human side of his characters always rings true. The section on Gillis awakened early is stunning in its simplicity, its insight into humanity, and its aching realism. I will never forget that chapter! Regardless of whether there would be four teenagers, and only four teenagers, in a colony, he does a great job revealing to us how teenagers respond to stressful social dynamics.

A highly memorable book! I can't wait for the sequal.

Rating:
Summary: This book needs an editor
Review: Steele is a lazy writer. Apparently little thought goes into his words, he just writes without thinking through anything. For example, the colonists arrive at Coyote with a huge supply of guns (Steele throws out the remark that automatic machine guns are setup around the perimeter to keep away the boids) - but the bullets are all 300 years old! And yet they still work. There is a sea that completely circles the equator. This would lead to enormous tides (plus, there is a Jupiter size planet right next door), but Steele misses that. The second sentence in the book read: "The Milky Way galaxy is nearly one hundred thousand light-years in diameter, within its spiral structure are approximately fifty thousand stars...." Huh? 50,000? All Steele has to do is go to askJeeves.com and ask how many stars are in the galaxy: answer 200 billion (more recent estimates are 400 billion.) At the end of the book, when the social collectists arrive, why would they want anything to do with completely primitive original landing party? They crossed interstellar space to subjegate 150 wayward colonists??? (The original colonists shudder at the idea of this social collectivism, but a few pages earlier Steele tells us that there aren't any locks in the Liberty town because everyone shares - merely ask for something and they will loan it to you it sounds as if the original colonists are already practicing social collectivism.) At one point Steele mentions a wooden currency - but that disappears after one paragraph. Apparently there are only two types of trees on the whole planet - blackwood and faux birch (Steele's paucity of ideas extends to lame names for the trees, the local fauna, everything.) We are expected to believe Gillis happened to spot a spaceship glancing out a port window, even though they are in deep space and thus no nearby sun will illuminate the craft - so do these ships light up like Christmas trees? And how likely are you to spot a ship when travelling a partial speed of light in vast empty interstellar distances? Besides, Gillis wakes up only 3 months after the voyage starts, so how can he spot a WHSS Glorious Destiny when it won't be built for another 50 years? At the end the colonists lock Chris and his mom (why the mom? What crime did she commit) into the jail and abandon them. What would happen if the WHSS people did the expected thing and ignored the Liberty colony, and went off somewhere else on the vast planet to found their own nation? Then poor Chris and his mom starve to death in the jail!!!

Obviously, I can go on and on about this very carelessly written and unimaginative book. If you want an exciting SF, try Legacy of Herot by Niven, or Fallen Dragon by Hamilton, or Permanence by Schroeder. There are many more books out there that are vastly better than this lame offering. Skip this! Don't waste your time!

Rating:
Summary: Lacks integrity and sense
Review: The author created a distinctive and interesting world - 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 on the shores of a sea-sized "river" - which would actually be subject to daily tides on the order of 1000 feet. 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 activites 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, 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, execution would be seriously considered - how can we possibly trust these fools in the future?

The work has a good narrative flow and is easy enough to read - especially the middle part (this thing is cobbled together from three novellas) 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.


Rating:
Summary: Good plot, bad science
Review: The good things: This book is well written and easy to read. Allen Steele has painted a plausible picture of future space exploration. Interesting social interactions, lively (although sometimes a bit "flat") characters.

The bad things: Lots and lots of very basic science errors pop up here and there. It's like the book has been written without regard to basic principles of physics. Some of the most striking examples: the "maps" in the book show "rivers" that practically flow in closed loops - all downwards; for some reason the author decided that crossing the line of the equator changes the direction in which the wind is blowing in each hemisphere; etc, etc. This sometimes gets annoying, especially as the plot relies heavily on some of these errors.

Generally, I think the book is worth reading, once the reader learns to ignore the bad science.

Rating:
Summary: Different
Review: The plot of the story is well covered by other reviewers, so i wont go into that.

The novel is made up of previously published short stories by Steele, which accounts for it's lack of flow from one part of the story to another. While the majority of the stories are loosely tied around a few people, the captain of the ship Robert E. Lee, and two young colonists, Wendy and Carlos, the best of the shorts deals with a crewman who was mistakently awakened from stasis hundreds of years to early, and how he deals with being the only human awake.

The ending was rather disappointing to me. I wont give anything away, but I expected more from the setup of the book.

Despite the ending, and despite how the book didnt flow well, i'd still be inclined to reccommend the novel. The individual stories were for the most part very interesting and well written, and it was hard to put the book down. The story dealing with the awakened crewman was worth the book all by itself. I just wish the feeling after i was through was a bit more satisfying.

Rating:
Summary: If it keeps you turning pages....
Review: The previous reviewers have covered well the scientific shortcomings of the novel, some obvious and other less so. (I did not think of the tidal problems till I read their reviews!) But, interesting science fiction does not always have to be scientifically accurate on every detail. We all lived with Captain Kirk not floating around the decks of the Enterprise despite no mention of artificial gravity. I don't think the novel sets out to be "Red Mars," i.e. a highly detailed technical dissertation. It uses just enough snappy scientific ideas to move the story along.

The main drawbacks for me were first the repetition, which comes from cobbling together the book from previously published materials. One expected a narrator to pop up every chapter and say, "When we last left our intrepid explorers..." The re-referencing of already established facts distracted from the pace of the story. I blame the editors on this one, as a few sentences cut here, and a few altered there, would have removed these annoying phrases.

The second thing that seemed odd was that the characters often had reactions like they stepped off of the pages of a 1950's teen novel. Women practically swoon and men gnash their teeth when fate reveals that an unwed pregnant girl is in their midst. Horrors! Mary Jo will never find a prom date. Not to belittle the problems of teen pregnancy, but as being a key crisis point for a scifi novel (that includes inter-steller kidnapping, murder,etc ) it'a bit anachronistic even now, let alone for characters living decades hence.

Final beef. Space exploration is still to be a largely Anglo-American enterprise, most participants leaning towards the more pallid races. As China forges ahead with plans their plans to get to Mars, can any writer seriously think that Europeans and Americans will be the main actors in space travel 100 years from now?

All that being said, the novel kept me turning the pages, the story did not drag, I learned a few new things about planets and space travel, and that means it can't be all that bad. Doesn't it?