COYOTE: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration
Foreword by Allen Steele
"Coyote had an unusually long gestation period, at least for one of my novels.
The first inkling came around 1993, while was I writing my sixth novel, The Tranquillity Alternative. During my research, which involved an alternative history of the NASA space program, I came across an illustration by Fred Freeman in the March 1953 issue of Collier’s: an astronaut-trainee sitting within a gyroscopic flight simulator, learning how to spacewalk in conditions approximating zero-gravity. An old-fashioned image, to be sure, made obsolete by the realities of history, but nonetheless it stuck in my mind, prompting me to start thinking about how one might prepare for interstellar missions.
At this time, the paradigm for this sort of thing was Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I knew at once that what I wanted to do was a more realistic treatment of the subject. No faster-than-light warp drives, no matter-replicators capable of materializing whatever you need whenever you need it, no highly-trained specialists for any occasion. Instead, what we’d have here was a ship capable of traveling at no more than a fraction of light-speed, with a largely untrained crew – indeed, half of them totally unprepared for space flight – having to settle a strange world with whatever they could improvise on the spot. In short, a novel about the exploration of a frontier, echoing the early colonization of America during the 17th century.
Even so, it took a long time for me to figure out exactly how to write such an ambitious novel. The book went through two false starts; first as Revival, which I abandoned after forty pages, and later as Year of the Coyote, which I made the mistake of trying to link to my Near-Space series. Indeed, if you read my last Near-Space novel, A King of Infinite Space (Harper-Prism, 1997), you can see how its ending sets up Year of the Coyote. The second attempt was no more successful than the first, though, and in frustration I trashed the unfinished manuscript. However, I kept my notes for the world I’d begun to create: Coyote, a habitable moon around a recently-discovered exoplanet in the 47 Ursae Majoris system.
It wasn’t until after I’d written my ninth novel, Chronospace, when Ginjer Buchanan, my editor at Ace, suggested that I return to this twice-aborted project. I had casually mentioned it to her in conversation a few years earlier, and one day in February 1999 she surprised me by asking if I’d ever thought about going back to work on it again. I considered Year of the Coyote to be a dead book, but since Ginjer was clearly interested in it, I decided to give it another shot. This time, though, I started over from scratch, abandoning the Near-Space timeline entirely and inventing an entirely new back-story and cast of characters. The only thing I retained from my earlier attempts was Coyote itself … and that was when I thanked myself for not destroying my notes for Year of the Coyote.
This time, though, I was a bit more cautious. Instead of launching myself straight into another novel, instead I wrote a short story as a trial balloon, testing some of the concepts and characters I’d begun to create. “The Boid Hunt” was published in an anthology, Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (DAW, 2000). Although the story went unnoticed and Star Colonies itself disappeared without a trace, this didn’t matter to me; for my intents and purposes, “The Boid Hunt” was complete success.
I’d recently begun collecting old issues of Astounding from the 40’s and 50’s, and thus had started to re-read some of the classic SF novels in their original form, as series of linked stories which had appeared in that magazine … specifically, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Clifford D. Simak’s City. Seeing how this approach allowed both Asimov and Simak to write novels that stretched over a long period of time and involved multiple points of view, I wondered if the same sort of thing could be done again. So I approached Gardner Dozois, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and pitched the idea to him. Gardner was willing to go along with this, so I followed up “The Boid Hunt” with “Stealing Alabama”, a novella that took the story back to its beginning. “Stealing Alabama” appeared in the January 2001 issue of Asimov’s, followed two months later by “The Days Between.”
“Stealing Alabama” would go on to win the annual Asimov’s Readers Poll and get nominated for a Hugo Award, and “The Days Between” would be nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Of course, I didn’t know these things would happen, any more than I could predict that I’d just embarked on an epic that would eventually grow to encompass three volumes, two spin-off novels, and a book-length novella, with no end yet in sight."
- Allen Steele
