Although there was quite a bit about this book to criticise, I still found it a very enjoyable read. It captured a sense of adventure and exploration that seems to be missing from a lot of modern SF. By using a "back to basics" hard SF platform, Allen Steele gets a fresh feeling into his writing.
The first issues that I had with the book were around the basic science, which jarred with me. My attention was drawn to this when it was mentioned that a character didn't recognise the constellations through a port hole when he was only 9 months into the journey. The top speed on this journey would be 0.2c. I think that the distortion to constellations would be minimal at this distance (at most 0.15ly). Assuming that the average visible star is at 40ly this would lead to an average shift of 0.2 degrees. More likely, the extra stars visible due to not being encumbered by an atmosphere would lead to a recognition issue, not distance travelled.
The light sail for deceleration at the destination was very glossed over. If it is good enough to decelerate from 0.2c in a couple of months at the destination, why wasn't it used to accelerate at the beginning of the journey avoiding the need of a bussard ramjet?
At the end of journey debriefing, the captain reiterated the fact that ship time was approximately 4 years behind earth time. He stated the new colony would be based on ship time and that the colonists should reset their watches! Of course, since the watches were on the ship they would have experienced the same time dilation as the ship itself, so they would already be correct (unless something else we don't know about set them to earth time at the end of the journey).
Again, 9 months into the journey a character spotted another ship. Near the end of the book another ship arrived at Coyote. After knowing they had only been travelling for around 50 years, the characters still assumed this was the same ship that had been spotted 249 years before.
My final gripe is that the story is a little disjointed, being spread over a fair number of years. It becomes obvious after a while that Coyote is effectively a collection of short stories that have been turned into a novel.
I think Allen Steele shows great promise, and I am looking forward to the sequel, which I hope has been written as a single novel and not a series of short stories stitched together. That way the problems the dogged this otherwise fun read should be easy to avoid.
tags: reviews |