Coyote

Coyote, Allen M. Steele, Ace Books, 2002

In the year 2070, the repressive United Republic of America is about to launch the starship Alabama. Its destination is Ursa Major, approximately 50 light years away; there the passengers and crew will set up the first human colony. At the last minute, the ship is hijacked by its captain and crew and the hand-picked colonists are replaced by a group of Dissident Intellectuals and their families.

America in 2070 is not a pleasant place. Any sort of dissent can earn a person a one-way trip to a reeducation 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 reeducation camp and put aboard the starship.

Traveling 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 neighbors 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."