Coyote (Coyote Series #1)

by Allen Steele

Overview

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…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780441011162
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/25/2003
Series:	Coyote Trilogy , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.74(w) x 10.88(h) x 1.18(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Allen Steele was a journalist who covered the space program. He later turned to fiction writing, and his first novel, Orbital Decay, published by Ace Books, was chosen as the best first novel of the year by Locus. Allen himself went on to be nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He began writing and selling to the science fiction magazines and is a three-time Hugo Award winner for his short fiction. In 2013, he received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for outstanding published works in science fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Splendid.”—The Denver Post
 
“Full of pleasant surprises.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“One of the best space-exploration novels in recent memory.”—Rocky Mountain News
 
“In the best Robert Heinlein tradition.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“An homage to wonder, hope and determination…Steele has constructed this glorious tale of a new starflung Mayflower from the legacies of Heinlein, Twain, Hemingway and others—and he has founded it on the essence of America.”—Stephen Baxter

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Allen Steele's Coyote is reminiscent of science fiction classics like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth. After stealing a starship full of political refugees, Captain Robert E. Lee and his crew travel to a distant planetary system with a habitable moon (named Coyote) with the dream of starting a colony free from governmental and social oppression.

The trip lasts 226 years, but while everyone is in biostasis, one of the crew members is accidentally awakened. With his cell permanently deactivated by the ship's AI, communications officer Leslie Gillis is doomed to a solitary life (and death) aboard the starship. When the rest of the crew is eventually reawakened as the ship reaches its destination, what they find is extraordinary.

Once the small colony is established on Coyote, they realize just how different their new world is from Earth. Exploration begins, and although a few colonists are killed by predators, the colony survives and even begins to thrive…that is, until a strange comet appears in the sky.

Coyote is an epic in every sense of the word, with complex story lines and wonderfully realistic characters who possess real flaws and dreams and problems. Not surprisingly, parts of this novel were nominated for Hugo Awards: "The Days Between" for Best Novelette and "Stealing Alabama" for Best Novella. This is one of the best science fiction novels I've read in years. Paul Goat Allen

...full of pleasant surprises.

New York Times Book Review

Steele has a no-nonsense style and an attention to his characters that make his books appealing...

USA Today

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. (Nov. 5) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly