October 3, 2005
Steele's trilogy about human settlers on an alien planet facing practical and moral challenges comes to a fitting close. The Coyote Federation is a healthy democracy now, but its citizens still depend on the products of Earth's technology. Earth, meanwhile, is sliding into ecological disaster and craves raw materials and room for emigrants. The two sides need each other, but it's unclear whether people have learned enough—or can control themselves well enough—to avoid making selfish little decisions like the ones that devastated humanity's birthplace. Shifting deftly among several characters, Hugo-winner Steele respects the various viewpoints keeping the debate fluid, but he also makes plausible that opposing individuals could grudgingly learn to respect each other enough to modify their rigid plans. As in the first two books in this popular SF series, Coyote
and Coyote Rising
, another major actor is the mysterious planet itself, which invites people to find new ways to think.
December 1, 2005
As resources, human and technological, dwindle, the interstellar colony of Coyote struggles hard to maintain even a medieval technology. Salvation apparently arrives in the form of a starship from Earth, but the ship bears disastrous news. Earth's environment and society are in collapse. Coyote no longer offers a new future for humanity; it offers the only future. That situation promptly raises the stakes in the knock-down, drag-out fight between hard-bitten survivors of the original settlers and members of the first generations after them; and the entrepreneurs who have arrived in the ship seem convinced that in the exploitation of Coyote's natural resources lies their best hope. Steele's sympathies are somewhat transparently with the settlers, and the whole novel has an even more Heinleinish flavor than does either " Coyote" (2002) or " Coyote Rising " (2004). Heinleinishness doesn't seem to keep Steele from winning awards or more readers; libraries, especially, with patrons nostalgic for "that good, old-time science fiction" should take note and place orders. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)