he year 2344 finds the Earth a mess. Ecological collapse is threatening every continent, bolstering authoritarian regimes such as the Western Hemisphere Union. But even though London is drowning, the European Alliance is a bit more liberal and outward-looking than the former Americas, and they're expecting good results from a mission launched almost 50 years ago to re-contact the single colony world named Coyote, in the star system of 47 Ursae Majoris. Due to arrive soon at Coyote, the starship EASS Columbus is carrying the second half of a brand-new starbridge device that will allow instantaneous transit between Earth and Coyote, fully opening up the fresh world for the first time as an invaluable ark for humanity.
Meanwhile, on Coyote itself, the colonists have flourished for 40 years, growing from 100 people to 7,000 scattered among eight communities that make up the Coyote Federation. After battling hostile native animals such as boids and fighting off a previous takeover attempt from Earth, residents such as Federation President Carlos Montero, his wife Wendy and his daughter Susan have earned the right to indulge in peacetime activities such as studying the monkeylike natives known as chirreeps.
When the Columbus arrives, however, the colony is unwillingly plunged into a new era. The starbridge, quickly up and running, means that the colony must deal with all the politics and population pressures of Earth. Soon Carlos and Wendy are off to the mother planet as ambassadors. Meanwhile, one of the crewmembers of the Columbus, Jon Parson, has gone native on Coyote, becoming friends with a hermit named Manny Castro, a downloaded human in a robot body known as a Savant. Manny and Jon soon learn secrets about the chirreeps, enlisting Susan Montero in their cause.
But an influx of greedy Terrans, allied with destructive elements among the Coyote residents, threatens both the chirreeps and everything the Coyote settlers value. Looks like another rebellion is the only answer.
An interplanetary trilogy ends
I must confess right off the bat to committing a cardinal reviewer's sin. I have not read the first two books in this series—Coyote (2002) and Coyote Rising (2004)—except in bits and pieces in magazine form. But luckily, Allen Steele compensates for chumps like me by giving clear and concise summaries of the backstory at necessary intervals, making this third volume very reader-friendly. Of course, prior acquaintance with the earlier books will enhance your experience even further.
In any case, the events of this volume alone constitute a satisfying arc and seem to bring the trilogy to a robust conclusion. (Although the climax actually opens outward in a surprising manner, perhaps portending spinoffs.)
With echoes of the work of Gordon Dickson and Clifford Simak, Steele offers myriad kinds of thrills. There's the first-contact riff with the chirreeps, handled generally very well, although left a bit inconclusive. The reader will feel dismay for mankind's despoliation of Coyote and sympathy for the well-developed alien race. On another plane, Steele has great fun with the whole nature of slower-than-light travel and time dilation and bio-stasis, jumping his narrative around between eras and causing one character, Jonas Whittaker, to meet people he remembers as children but who are now much older than he.
But the real meat of this book and series is in the frontier realities of homesteading a new world. Steele conveys a tangible sense of how it would feel to explore and settle virgin lands, replaying the history of the Americas, one of the grandest myths of the past 500 years. (And sometimes he gets specific, with the rebellion led by Jon Parson feeling like an analogue of John Brown's principled and doomed stand.) Coyote itself becomes a prime character, against and with which the humans can interact.
At the start of his career, Steele was famously criticized for a tendency that might be dubbed "cultural inertia." He had orbital construction workers listening to Grateful Dead music, which did not seem futuristic enough to some. There's a tiny trace of that here. The world of 2344, despite space elevators and new tyrannies, seems much closer to our world in attitude and culture than the world of 2005 feels to 1650, for instance. But in the end, it's Coyote that engages our prime attention, and that globe resonates with eternal concerns.
