Coyote
by Allen Steele
(Ace, $23.95, 390 pages, hardcover; published in November 2002.)
Allen Steele's Coyote begins in the United Republic of America,
a near-future successor to the USA ruled by a totalitarian regime  calling
itself the Liberty Party whose disingenuous rhetoric of repression all
too chillingly echoes the policies of contemporary real-world politicians.
The pet project of the President of the URA is to build a gigantic
starship that will colonize space, starting with Coyote, an Earth-like
world discovered by American astronomers. The starship Alabama and its
load of approximately 100 crewmembers and passengers are readied for
the history-making journey.
President Conroy does not suspect that the crew is largely made up
of rebels who oppose his regime. They plan to steal the Alabama and
substitute the government's hand-picked loyal colonists with "dissident
intellectuals" who have been targeted or arrested by the state. Once
the ship arrives on Coyote, however, political tensions among the people
aboard the Alabama are far from resolved. Nevertheless, the colonists
set out to build their idea of utopia on Coyote -- or at least as close
to it as they can manage.
Steele's book is a mosaic of stories that follows these travails,
from the plan to commandeer the starship, to the rigours of colonization,
to what happens when the Earth finally catches up with them. It's a
subversive grand adventure, both intelligent and emotionally involving.
Steele's descriptions of Coyote and of life there are immediate, gritty,
and sensual. He combines to spectacular effect the wonder of exploration
with the hardships of survival on an alien world.
The door is left wide open for more Coyote stories. And I hope
that Steele will indeed further explore this exciting new world.
Originally published
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 15 March 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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