The River Horses by Allen Steele
Subterranean Press, $35.00, 119pp, deluxe hardcover, 9781596061323.
Warning: this review contains some spoilers.
Allen Steele’s Coyote series is becoming a phenomenon, and deservedly so. He’s a great writer, and he’s designed a fascinating world in an engrossing future in which he’s telling captivating stories.
This particular story, a stand-alone novella that takes place between Coyote Rising and Coyote Frontier, tells us how Marie Montero and Manny Castro wound up on Great Dakota, and where the Thompson Wood Company came from. It’s told with Steele’s usual style: diary entries, interspersed with third-person narrated chapters to move the story along. And, as with the rest of the series, he’s seamlessly blended nifty futuristic technology with a rustic wresting-a-living-from-the-land feel.
Wild children (not so childish after winning a guerilla war against a second wave of colonization from Earth) Marie and Lars have been kicked out of civilization. “Go explore,” they’re told, “and don’t come back for six months, or else we’ll have to throw you back in the stockade.” Post-human Savant Manuel Castro is sent with them, partly as a nursemaid, but mostly because no one really trusts the man who seems more robot than human. As Tom, Huck, and Injun Joe… I mean Marie, Lars, and Manny set out on the trek, they discover another group of outcasts from New Boston. Both groups have members intent on making a better world for themselves, but they also both harbor people who really should be outcasts. People are not who they seem; relationships change, tempers flare, exiles are exiled, and things seem to take a turn for the better… until one of the outcast-outcasts calls in an emergency. They’ve discovered river horses: big, people-eating monsters. They slink back, proverbial tails between their legs, and try to integrate into the new colony abuilding on Great Dakota. And fortunately for them, they have an ally on the Colonial Council, who will see to it that they’re a part of the future.
As I said, Steele can tell a story, and he’s telling one here. If you’ve already read the other novels, this one will fill in some of the gaps. And if you haven’t read them yet, add this one into the sequence for a seamless story. Good stuff.