Spindrift by Allen Steele
Ace Books, $24.95, 354pp, hardcover. ISBN: 9780441014712.
Spindrift isn’t the fourth book in the Coyote trilogy, but it is the start of a new series in Steele’s Coyote universe. Some of the main characters and events in this novel have been mentioned in passing, or made brief appearances, in the three previous books.
The first three novels of colonization focused mostly on building a society on an uninhabited planet. After the initial “how do we get there,” there was very little of the techy stuff Steele’s readers have come to love. Not to say they weren’t good stories: they were very good, with new worlds to conquer, wonderfully rich political futures extrapolated, and some nicely alien aliens to leaven the mix. But they had a little less of the gosh-way spaceships and stuff one might expect.
Spindrift makes up for that in a big way. This time out, we’re on Earth, dealing with the Western Hemisphere Union, the European Union, and an interstellar object that just may be humanity’s first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. The only problem is, this intelligence doesn’t seem to be heading to Earth. Indeed, they’re probably just passing by the neighborhood, and if we want to chat, we’re going to have to catch them before they run off.
How to do it? How to get there in time? Well, there’s the untested starbridge which can get the EASS Galileo part of the way there in time. And who do we send? Well, the crew will probably be the best in their fields, but what do you do when the best in one field you desperately need is serving a life sentence for attempted genocide? And of course, a big mission like this will have political ramifications, and political appointees in the crew. Problems problems problems.
Steele gets them off the ground and on their way, and then the fun begins. Is that a missile on your docking collar, or are you just nervous to see me? And how do we decide what to do with it without the political officer twigging to these machinations?
Well, problems disappear (and new problems arise) when first contact comes, if we can truly call it first contact. Steele knows how to write a novel of exploration, and alien aliens doing what they do for alien reasons, and he’s got a pretty good idea of how humans will react when thrown into such outlandish situations. This is definitely a good read.
And for those who can’t get enough of Steele’s writing or the Coyote universe, there’s word that the next spin-off novel Galaxy Blues will start appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the October/November issue (Ace will publish the hardcover next April).