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Reader Reviews | |
Review by Paul Lappen (140803) Rating (8/10) Review
by Paul Lappen America in 2070 is not a pleasant place. Any sort of dissent can earn a person a one-way trip to a re-education camp. The public face of the camps show them as happy places full of well-fed people. The reality is very different. Midnight arrests inside one's own home are common. As part of the plot, a group of D.I.'s are intercepted on their way to a re-education camp and put aboard the starship. Travelling at 20 percent of the speed of light, the trip will take over 200 years. Through a computer malfunction (or is it?), one of the crew, Leslie Gillis, is prematurely brought out of stasis. The computer will not let him return to stasis. To keep from going insane, he plays chess against the computer, he writes a magnum opus of a fantasy novel and he finds some art supplies and paints giant murals all over the ship. He spends the next 32 years totally alone, until he dies in a fall. Their new home, Coyote (actually a moon of a gas giant planet) doesn't have separate continents like Earth, but is all land, crisscrossed by rivers. The native plants and animals are edible, but hardly delicious. The colonists find out, the hard way, that they are not top of the food chain. In a bit of adolescent rebellion, a group of teenagers go off on an expedition of their own. There is tension among the colonists between those loyal and not loyal to the Republic. Many years later, several ships full of colonists from Earth arrive, but this is not an occasion for celebrating. The hijacking of the Alabama was the beginning of the end for the Republic, but it has been replaced with something equally repugnant. The original colonists have a hard choice: accept 5,000 new neighbours or fight.
Told in a series of unconnected novelettes, this is a strong,
well-done piece of writing. It works as a political novel and
as a planetary exploration novel. You won't go wrong reading Coyote. |
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