COYOTE FRONTIER: A Novel of Interstellar Colonization
Foreword by Allen Steele
"When I finished Coyote Rising, I was certain that I had completed the task I had begun with the first book. By then, Coyote had been published to widespread acclaim; glowing reviews appeared everywhere from The New York Times and USA Today to The Rocky Mountain News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with SF magazines like Analog and Science Fiction Chronicle chiming in as well – indeed, Locus readers picked it to be one of the top five SF novels of the year. And the stories that made up Coyote Rising had gone over well in Asimov’s; “The Garcia Narrows Bridge” and “Liberation Day” would both go on to win the annual Readers’ Poll, one of those rare occasions when the work of a single author dominates the poll.
So I could have stopped there. Indeed, I was greatly tempted to do so. I’d always said that I would never write a trilogy, mainly because the third book is almost always a letdown; I didn’t want to follow that trend, nor did I want to write another Coyote book just to cash in on the success of the first two. If I didn’t feel like I had a good story to tell, I told both myself and my friends, I wouldn’t write a third book.
Yet during the summer of 2003, even as I wrote a handful of short stories and dabbled again – for the last time -- with Mountains of the Moon, my mind kept returning to the place I’d created and the people who lived there. Although I’d completed the story arc that I’d begun with Coyote, there were still various issues that were still left unsettled. I found myself thinking about environmental problems that would be associated with the colonization of a new world, along with the politics of such an endeavor. And it occurred to me that these things might echo not only the conquest of the western frontier during the 1800’s, but also what was going on in our world today. So, yes, there was a story to be told; the question was, did I really want to tell it?
As before, my wife had the final say. When Linda read the manuscript of Coyote Rising, her remark was, “You better write another book, or I’ll kill you.” Given such sentiments, I had little choice but to write a third Coyote novel.
During a breakfast meeting at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, Ginjer Buchanan gave me the green light to proceed with Coyote Frontier. Gardner Dozois was also interested in continuing the series in Asimov’s; a few months later, however, he resigned as editor, and although his successor, Sheila Williams, had enjoyed the stories as well, she was reluctant about the short time-frame in which she’d have to run eight installments before the book’s scheduled publication date. So while I continued with the episodic framework of the first two books, none of the stories appeared first in Asimov’s. In hindsight, this liberated me quite a bit; Part Five, “Emissary to Earth”, is practically a short novel in itself, and thus longer than the maximum word-length for Asimov’s.
As I approached the end of Coyote Frontier, I was convinced that, once and for all, I was done with the series. I had written my trilogy; now I could go on and do something else. However, I also realized that I was setting up a situation that could only be resolved with yet another book … not a fourth Coyote novel, but rather a related story set in the same universe. Since it involved an idea that I’d been toying with for the last several years, once again I left a loose end. A year later, I began work on Spindrift … and a few months after finishing that novel, I set out to write its sequel, Galaxy Blues.
Will there be a fourth Coyote novel? Eventually, yes … and probably sooner than either you and I may think. If you haven’t figured it out already, there’s no master plan to all this. I’m making it up as I go along.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next … and I can’t wait to find out."
- Allen Steele
