Patchwork Space Colonization

A Great Start

Coyote by Allen Steele (published in 2002) is a book I read and enjoyed perhaps ten years ago. The series of three books (Coyote, Coyote Rising, Coyote Frontier) were recently on sale on Audible and, having happy memories of the first book (less so of the second book, which I DNFed), I thought I’d give these collected works a second try.

The premise is one that appeals strongly to me. I enjoy colonization narratives and Coyote — on the surface at least — presses all the buttons. An interstellar hibernation ship must travel for over 200 years at fractional light speeds to reach an Earth-like planet ~40 light years away.

There’s more to the story than this, though, and the book starts very strongly. The author pulls off having the colonization ship stolen by dissidents escaping from a politically fractured and totalitarian United States of America.

The heist is just about believable in its outrageousness and an enjoyable read, with the author keeping the tension up all the way to the end of this section of the book. The trope of a United States where some states cede from the Union is handled competently and is only peripheral to the main plot.

But … there are more interesting things to come.

One of the travelers wakes up from hibernation a number of months into the 200+ year trip. He can’t return to sleep and so must live his life alone on the ship, with the rest of the passengers all deep in hibernation.

(There is also a clever and cogent explanation for the awakening, which resonates later on in the book, an unfortunately rare instance of where foreshadowing is used to good effect.)

The section describing the solitary existence of this passenger is believable, fascinating, and moving. This was my first encounter with the idea of being marooned in a ship full of sleepers and, like the theft of the ship, I enjoyed this part of the story.

Some years later I watched the movie Passengers (2016), which has the same idea at its core. The screenplay was written in 2007 (Wikipedia). Yet, there is no mention of Steele’s book as either source material or inspiration, which surprises me.

A Poor Arrival

However, the plot of the book starts to bog down once the ship reaches Coyote (a very large moon orbiting a gas giant, which orbits the system’s star) and the passengers are woken up. (Oddly, the film Passengers has a similar structural problem, starting well and then becoming something else — a topic for another blog.)

The first of the problems to perplex me was the revelation that there was a 50% chance the planet would likely be uninhabitable if the amino acids on the planet had the wrong stereochemistry or “handedness.”

On Earth, almost all amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) are left-handed (L-form). A planet where evolution “picked” right-handed amino acids (D-form) would be very difficult to colonize for Earth-evolved organisms, for the reason that our enzymes could not process D-form amino acids, making all the indigenous plants and animals essentially inedible (or worse).

The bulk of the colonists appear to be unaware of this sterochemical Russian roulette. Would they have been quite so willing to embark on a journey with a 50% chance of failure and death by starvation? However, they dodge the metaphorical bullet. (Why are they all woken up before this critical question is resolved?)

The lack of foreshadowing of this potentially fatal problem makes its revelation bemusing and the scene in which it is resolved — literally “phew, everything’s alright, we not all dead” — is robbed of any drama or tension, and took me right out of the story.

Having raised this interesting aspect of biological compatibility, Steele doesn’t explore any of the other peculiarities of biochemical evolution on Earth, which could have rendered the trip null and void. His editor should have recommended removing the guff about stereochemistry. Unfortunately, there are more problems to come.

An Unironic Manifest Destiny

The colonists seem to brought such a limited amount of material (why?) that they are forced to live like early colonists of what became the western United States. (How did they know there would be Earth-like trees on the planet with which to build log cabins? What if there had been no trees? What if Coyote had been a water planet? And so on.)

Indeed, another problem with the story is its almost exclusive US theming and focus. This will probably not be a problem for US fans of SF, but for readers from other countries, it quickly becomes tiresome and boorish, a kind of completely unironic “manifest destiny” in space, as if the novel was a product of the 1950s rather than the 2000s.

Another opportunity missed is Steele’s imagining of the planet’s exo-biology. It is so close to being present-day Earth-like (birds, fish, mammals, insects) that the new biology revealed seems less interesting than the biology we actually know about on Earth today.

This doesn’t make any sense. We — our present flora and fauna — are the product of five mass extinctions and countless other one-off events. Birds, for example, are derived from dinosaurs that were wiped out in part by an asteroid strike on Earth. How does Steele think birds arose on Coyote? The answer might be fascinating but he doesn’t say. (At least, in this book. Perhaps he will in the next books?)

A greater narrative misstep is settling up the problem that the colonists must survive the first winter on this new planet — will they, won’t they? — and then entirely skipping over the trial and focusing on two rather dislikeable teenagers for the rest (about half) of the book.

The Wendy and Carlos Show

Neither Wendy or Carlos, who will become partners, have any great charm. Perhaps this was intentional, that they should be obnoxious self-centered children in young adult bodies. If so, it doesn't make for an empathetic and interesting read (I kept hoping until the very end that they might come to a satisfyingly gristly end but … no luck).

Worse, this section of the book — a kind of Huckleberry Finn adventure episode — hits all the most tiresome YA cliches on the head, to the point where I would either be rolling my eyes or groaning out loud.

To add insult to injury, the writing in the second half of the book feels padded, and the plot slows to a crawl compared to the drama and tension of the first half of the book.

Strangely, the events transpiring on Earth after the colony ship is stolen are presented in a highly concentrated exposition capsule that, had this part of the story been expanded, and replaced much of the Wendy and Carlo show, would have greatly strengthened the novel.

Finally, to cap everything off, the arrival of a second colony ship from Earth, dispatched many dozens of years after the dissident ship left, brings an even greater moment of forehead slapping and disillusioned head shaking.

I won’t reveal more at this point, I’ll leave you to find out for yourself if you are as disappointed as I was about the second half of the book, and how Steele sets up the next book in the series (which I now feel committed to listen to, although currently not with any enthusiasm).

Overall, I would say that my memories of enjoying the book ten years ago were thoroughly fulfilled by the first half of the story and badly let down by the second half.

There are several plot problems that Steels’ editors and/or advance readers should have rescued him from, and someone should have strongly encouraged him to cut the tedious waffle in the second half of the book by half and replace it with the much more interesting events happening on Earth.

Whether I would recommend the Coyote series now very much depends on the subsequent books in the series.

Nota Bene

On perusing Google for the publication date, I read the entry in Wikipedia for the series, and discovered Coyote is a “fix-up” novel (a collection of linked stories published independently and then collectioned into a single novel).

This makes sense of several things.

First, there are a number of superfluious summaries scattered through the different sections of the book, explained what happened in the previous sections. These could easily have been removed. That they weren’t is lazy editing and/or writing.

Second, that these were stand-alone stories helps explain — but does not excuse — the hit-and-miss forshadowing. Again, these problems could have been easily fixed by a competent editor and some simple attention to detail.

Third, the strange plotting and jarring thematic shifts of the second part of the novel are presumably a result of the piece-meal approach to writing the stories. This is a pity, because the ideas have a lot of potential, even the groan-induing teen section, and the embarassing final reveal, if only they had been handled differently.

P.S.

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