[bksvol-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, July 8, 2010

From: "EVAN REESE" <mentat3@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <scifi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:58:36 -0400

Hi Folks,

We had a good crowd at last night's meeting. Unfortunately, most people did not
like the book I picked. (Even I didn't think it was all that great, although a
couple of us thought the ending was quite good.) But that's the way it goes
sometimes.

The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, July 8, 2010.

Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 Central, 7 Mountain, 6 Pacific, 01:00 UTC.

Place: Book Nook at:

http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e

This month, we're going to read Coyote by Allen M. Steele.

Available on both Bookshare and BARD.

The Bookshare link is at:

http://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/11016?returnPath=L3NlYXJjaD9rZXl3b3JkPWNveW90ZSBzdGVlbGUm

and the link to the version on BARD is at:

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.60862

The Bookshare long synopsis is as follows:

On a future Earth where the U.S. is ruoled by religious extremists, the first
interstellar colony ship is hijacked by a group of scientists. This is a
fast-paced, plausible and highly readable account of what happens and of the
planet of Coyote and its dangers.

Here are a couple of other descriptions of the book from Amazon:

From Publishers Weekly
At first, this novel from Hugo winner Steele looks like a fairly conventional
tale of high-tech intrigue-in this case, rebels against a right-wing American
dictatorship plot to steal the prototype interstellar spaceship built to
immortalize the government's ideology by planting a colony of fanatics on
another star's planet. However, once the freedom seekers arrive on the new
world, Coyote, things get a lot more interesting. Coyote is habitable but
alien, full of flora and fauna that upset the colonists' easy preconceptions.
The young people, in particular, have to find their identities in a dangerous
but wonderful environment; their discovery of what they can do individually as
well as what they owe to the group nicely illustrates the name the starship's
captain, R.E. Lee, has given their settlement: Liberty. That Steele's novel has
been stitched together out of a series of short stories has advantages and
disadvantages. The jumping around can be repetitious, but it also lets readers
see the same events from different angles. By the same token, the narrative
doesn't stay with individual characters, especially adults, long enough for the
reader to get to know them, but it does give a panorama of the developing
community. By the end, when an especially big challenge appears, the colonists
are ready to face it confidently. The discovery of a new world is one of SF's
most potent themes, and Steele handles it well.

From Booklist
Steele's latest space-advocacy yarn begins late in this century and ends two
centuries further on, on the distant planet Coyote. In between comes a
fast-moving, vividly detailed, somewhat didactic story of gallant misfits, led
by a spaceship captain named Robert E. Lee, fleeing an Earth that has lost its
chances because of dictatorship and technophobia. The refugee ship Ala bama is
a character in its own right, as is Captain Lee, despite his name. Steele
cobbles together hardware, people, and the perils of Coyote into a
well-balanced whole, with not all the good guys surviving the perils and with
most of the not-so-good guys developed into believable people. Reckon this
Steele's most ambitious novel yet, in which he attains the level of Heinlein
and Poul Anderson in that, howsoever much he preaches, he still gives us a
cracking good story that even readers not of the true space-exploration faith
will enjoy.

Sounds like it'll be a pretty good yarn, so hope to see another strong turnout
next time.

Evan

[bksvol-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, July 8, 2010

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