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Coyote Rising: | ||||||||||||||||||
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n 2070, a group of dissidents led by a descendant of Gen. Robert E. Lee stole the starship Alabama from a repressive right-wing American government and fled 46 light-years from Earth to the system of 47 Ursae Majoris, where a moon called Coyote, orbiting a gas giant, harbored conditions hospitable to human life. After a journey of 230 years (subjectively somewhat less, due to relativistic effects), most of it spent in stasis, the colonists founded the town of Liberty, established a free and democratic government and set about the difficult business of surviving on an alien world.
Scant years later, another starship appeared, the Seeking Glorious Destiny Among the Stars for the Greater Good of Social Collectivism, or Glorious Destiny for short. As the name implies, the right-wing government the Alabama had left behind had in the meantime fallen, and its successor, a socialist dictatorship, had sent a new ship in pursuit, one that traveled at a higher relativistic speed and thus, although launched decades after the Alabama, arrived at Coyote only a few years later. On board were a colonial governor, Matriarch Luisa Hernandez, a cyborg lieutenant governor, Savant Manuel Castro, new colonists and a contingent of soldiers with orders to bring the original colonists into the fold of social collectivism whether they liked it or not. Mostly they didn't, and the majority of Capt. Lee's crew hightailed it across the East Channel and vanished into the unexplored area known as Midland.
Now, years later, other starships have followed the Glorious Destiny, bringing hundreds of new colonists to Coyote in the name of social collectivism. Under the militaristic rule of Matriarch Hernandez and Savant Castro, most of those people live brutish lives in a teeming slum that has grown up around Liberty. Hernandez is obsessed with finding the dissident colonists and punishing them; to this end, she is building a bridge across the East Channel using conscripted labor. At the same time, a group of young dissidents on Midland—freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on one's point of view—takes violent steps to reclaim Liberty ... by any means necessary.
This volatile situation is aggravated by the arrival of the Spirit of Social Collectivism Carried to the Stars, commanded by Capt. Fernando Baptiste. Baptiste comes with orders to smash the dissidents, but Hernandez, asserting her authority as Matriarch, insists on leading the mission despite a lack of military experience. Meanwhile, Capt. Lee, knowing his crew cannot withstand the coming onslaught, launches a daring attack—at the very moment Coyote itself rises in deadly rebellion.
Novellas turned almost novel
Like its predecessor, 2002's Coyote, Coyote Rising is a fix-up novel consisting of stories that first appeared in print elsewhere. These stories have now become chapters. From an economic standpoint, this is an effective way to write a novel, since the author gets paid once for each story and then again for the book as a whole. The effectiveness from an artistic standpoint is less certain, however. A string of stories, even when they share a setting and characters, does not a novel make.
Allen Steele is a master craftsman when it comes to short fiction: His two Hugo awards came in the novella category. It is no surprise that the stories making up Coyote Rising are almost uniformly fine. But because the individual stories do not cohere into something larger than themselves, and indeed show little evidence of having been more than perfunctorily revised to do so (basic information presented once is needlessly—and annoyingly—repeated, for example), the novel ultimately disappoints.
Of course, Steele didn't suddenly look at this group of stories and decide to turn them into a novel. They were written with that intent, and while the focus of each story is on particular characters and events, and each is more or less complete and satisfying in itself, strands of an overarching narrative are present.But they are insufficiently developed. To strain a metaphor, think of the novel as a rocket heading to an out-of-system destination, and the stories as planets within the system that must be visited along the way, each visit adding to the velocity of the rocket by means of gravitational slingshotting. The trouble is that the gravity fields of the stories are so strong that they slow the novel down, and it never achieves escape velocity. Because each story supplies a satisfying resolution, there is little room for suspense. Steele seems to have recognized this critical lack of momentum, for he attempts to supply it in the penultimate section, "Liberation Day," by means of a natural event that is too convenient by far. It's always a bad sign when an author relies on a deus ex machina to resolve his plot.
Yet if Coyote Rising disappoints as a novel, it's worth reading as a collection of linked stories about a struggle for survival and freedom very much in the Heinleinian mode—perhaps a bit too much so. In any case, what sticks in the mind isn't the author's politics, but his characters. Characters like James Garcia, the aloof genius of an architect enlisted against his will by the Matriarch to build her bridge across the East Channel, who in the process discovers and embraces a humanity he never realized he was missing. Or Zoltan Shirow, a hideously altered posthuman who brings his cult of disciples to Coyote on a divinely ordained mission to redeem humanity.
It's hard to understand why Steele chose to beat the dead horse of socialism in these pages. That the U.S. might morph into a right-wing dictatorship is a logically plausible, if unlikely, scenario, but a dictatorship of the proletariat such as contemplated here is pure fantasy. — Paul
Also in this issue: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross
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