Coyote by Allen Steele is the first in a series of seven (as of March 3, 2009) science fiction books. In print, Coyote has an Amazon sales rank of #145,794 in books, and it ranks #28,867 in the Kindle store.
I read Coyote neither in print nor in Kindle format, but listened to it as an audiobook read by Peter Gamin. There is a cool introduction to the audiobook in which Allen Steele discusses the origin of the series. However, Peter Gamin really annoyed me as narrator. His reading style was emotionless, reminding me of a computer converting text to speech. Worse, when he attempted to change his voice to depict Spanish-speaking or female characters, his voice had a mocking quality which, I'm sure, was unintentional- but, nevertheless, detracted from the story.
Like the hills and valleys on the planet Coyote, the first novel of the Coyote series had its high points and low points. The opening of the book was written in present tense. I'd guess Steele made the present tense decision in order to add even more tension to the already nail-biting events of the opening. I was about to despair that the entire book would be in the present tense, but was relieved to find that large stretches of the book, such as journal entries, were written in the storytelling past tense.
The opening also suffered from an overly black and white political landscape. The conflict between the mean-for-no-reason establishment, and the tragic Dissident Intellectuals being shipped like Jews to concentration camps, was painted in broad, uninteresting strokes just to establish the good guys and bad guys. However, once I suspended disbelief and accepted the naively conceived political climate, I found myself looking for any excuse to listen to more Coyote. Steele ratcheted the tension of the "Journey from Earth" with a visceral sense of dread that left my heart racing.
Coyote seems to me a fantasy novel wearing science fiction clothing. Sure, there are space ships, biostasis fields, and Savants (people who have traded in their bodies for machines)- but the mysteries for those who journey to Coyote do not lie in the wonder of technology or human aspiration and reason. Visions, ghosts, dreams, and, ironically, a fantasy novel written by one of the colonists, are key to the novel's sense of wonder. What's more, those who reach the planet aren't setting up state-of-the-art research labs- they are farmers, barkeeps, adventurers. And the world they attempt to colonize is filled with fantastical beasts. The creatures on Coyote reminded me of those in John Varley's Gaea Trilogy, in which space explorers land on a new planet to find centaurs and flying angels. Steele does not use traditional fantasy archetypes to populate his alien planet the way Varley did, but descriptions of his creatures have more in common with fantasy than they do science fiction.
Coyote is a great world for adventure, for stretching out the cramped limbs of your imagination. If, as the ending of the first novel implied, politics are going to play a large role in the Coyote series, I hope Steele portrays political conflict with a deeper and more realistic investigation into the motives of the "bad guys."
I read Coyote neither in print nor in Kindle format, but listened to it as an audiobook read by Peter Gamin. There is a cool introduction to the audiobook in which Allen Steele discusses the origin of the series. However, Peter Gamin really annoyed me as narrator. His reading style was emotionless, reminding me of a computer converting text to speech. Worse, when he attempted to change his voice to depict Spanish-speaking or female characters, his voice had a mocking quality which, I'm sure, was unintentional- but, nevertheless, detracted from the story.
Like the hills and valleys on the planet Coyote, the first novel of the Coyote series had its high points and low points. The opening of the book was written in present tense. I'd guess Steele made the present tense decision in order to add even more tension to the already nail-biting events of the opening. I was about to despair that the entire book would be in the present tense, but was relieved to find that large stretches of the book, such as journal entries, were written in the storytelling past tense.
The opening also suffered from an overly black and white political landscape. The conflict between the mean-for-no-reason establishment, and the tragic Dissident Intellectuals being shipped like Jews to concentration camps, was painted in broad, uninteresting strokes just to establish the good guys and bad guys. However, once I suspended disbelief and accepted the naively conceived political climate, I found myself looking for any excuse to listen to more Coyote. Steele ratcheted the tension of the "Journey from Earth" with a visceral sense of dread that left my heart racing.
Coyote seems to me a fantasy novel wearing science fiction clothing. Sure, there are space ships, biostasis fields, and Savants (people who have traded in their bodies for machines)- but the mysteries for those who journey to Coyote do not lie in the wonder of technology or human aspiration and reason. Visions, ghosts, dreams, and, ironically, a fantasy novel written by one of the colonists, are key to the novel's sense of wonder. What's more, those who reach the planet aren't setting up state-of-the-art research labs- they are farmers, barkeeps, adventurers. And the world they attempt to colonize is filled with fantastical beasts. The creatures on Coyote reminded me of those in John Varley's Gaea Trilogy, in which space explorers land on a new planet to find centaurs and flying angels. Steele does not use traditional fantasy archetypes to populate his alien planet the way Varley did, but descriptions of his creatures have more in common with fantasy than they do science fiction.
Coyote is a great world for adventure, for stretching out the cramped limbs of your imagination. If, as the ending of the first novel implied, politics are going to play a large role in the Coyote series, I hope Steele portrays political conflict with a deeper and more realistic investigation into the motives of the "bad guys."
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