[bookshare-discuss] Re: Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, July 8, 2010
- From: "Kim Friedman" <kimfri11@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:41:18 -0700
Hi, Evan, I get Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog every month and have
read Alan Steele's Coyote novelettes. Very interesting stuff. Regards, Kim.
_____
From: EVAN REESE [mailto:mentat3@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2010 8:59 AM
To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;
scifi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club,
Thursday, July 8, 2010
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=L3NlYXJjaD9rZXl3b3JkPW
NveW90ZSBzdGVlbGUm
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
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