One of my favorite space operas is coming back to print

This is a delightful bit of news: Allen M. Steele announced on Facebook that his Coyote novels are coming back to print, thanks to Open Road Media. The science fiction series is made up of eight installments: an initial trilogy (Coyote, Coyote Rising, and Coyote Frontier), followed by a two-book arc (Coyote Horizon and Coyote Destiny), followed by three standalone books set in the same world (Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and Hex.) He also published a handful of additional short stories set in the world.

In his post, Steele explained that the books have been out of print for a while (they have been available as audiobooks on Audible) and that Open Road will release series with new artwork by William W. Connors. Coyote, Coyote Rising, and Coyote Frontier will be released on December 16th, with Coyote Horizon and Coyote Destiny arriving on January 20th, 2026, and Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and Hex coming on February 17th. In an email, Steele confirmed that the books would come out in both digital and paperback editions.

Coyote begins in 2070, where the United States is ruled by an fascist, right-wing regime that came to power after the "Second American Revolution." In an attempt to show off their technical prowess and to take their ideology beyond Earth, the government builds an interstellar starship, the URSS Alabama, which will transport colonists to the 47 Ursae Majoris system, about 45.3 light-years from Earth. As the mission is preparing to leave, its captain, Robert E. Lee, upends their plans: he and his allies replaced the vetted colonists with political dissidents and hijacks the ship, hoping to escape the oppression.

The ship takes around 230 years to head out to the system, which is home to a gas giant named Bear with a habitable moon: Coyote. The passengers are put into suspended animation, and midway through the journey, one of them, Leslie Gillis, is awakened and endures a solidary existence for the rest of his life, writing a children's book on the walls and observing an alien spacecraft at one point.

When the crew arrives in 2300, they find that Gillis's awakening has severely depleted their supplies, and they have to accelerate their plans to set up a colony on the moon, which proves to be a challenging time, and they have to contend not only with the Coyote's seasons and weather, but the lifeforms that are already living there.

In the following novels, Steele explores the development of the colony and their own struggles to form a new society and government, as well as the arrival of a new wave of colonists from Earth who come with a very different ideology, worldview, and intentions for Coyote.

Voyaging to Allen M. Steele’s Coyote

A stellar book about interstellar colonization

Transfer OrbitAndrew Liptak

In a lot of ways, Coyote feels like a welcome and somewhat updated throwback to the Golden Age of science fiction. It's a book that has a little bit of everything to it, from hard SF problem solving to political commentary to youthful adventures on a new frontier. There's a reason for that, structure and story-wise.

In a 2009 interview with Ann Wilkes, Steele explained that he had trouble cracking the idea for the story: it "went through a decade-long gestation period, during which I attempted twice to write it as a normal linear novel. But the story was much too complex for the traditional novel form, so I had to come up with a different way of doing this."

His solution was to look back at some of the genre's classics: "I read and collect a lot of old SF, including magazines from the 30's and 40’s, and it was around this time that I re-read some classics – Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and also Clifford Simak’s City – in their original forms as story cycles published in Astounding," he explained. "It occurred to me that this form, which had largely fallen out of use during the last few decades, might be my solution to the problem."

The result is something known as a fixup novel: a book made up of a series of stories that come together to form a cohesive narrative. Between 2000 and 2001, Steele published "The Boid Hunt" (June 2000, Star Colonies), "Stealing Alabama" (January 2001, Asimovs), "The Days Between" (March 2001, Asimovs), "Coming to Coyote" (July 2001, Asimovs), "Liberty Journals" (October 2001, Aismovs), and "Glorious Destiny" (Coyote, later Asimovs). He then published them together as a novel in 2002.

As a genre, science fiction has often explored colonization, sometimes drawing from historical examples like the British Empire and American expansion into western North America. It's often been something of a product of its time, as authors uncritically plopped settlers down onto inhabited worlds and readers followed along as humans took their place. As the genre matured, so too did the authors and the stories they told: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is a striking example, as is Karen Traviss's fantastic 2003 short story "Suitable for the Orient."

In his interview with Wilkes, Steele explained that Coyote was his attempt to explore elements of America's colonial history:

"The first three novels [are] about the settlement of a frontier. However, the Old West wasn’t my source of inspiration. Instead, I was thinking more about the first American frontier: New England, where I live now, and the South, where I was born and raised. If you look at what was going on in those regions during the 1600’s and 1700’s – the exploration of the New World, the gradual expansion of early settlements, the political conflicts between Europe and its colonies – then you’ll see where the parallels lie."

The resulting books are a nuanced, interesting look at what it's like to set down roots on an alien world. If I had to pick a personal top ten list for my favorite science fiction novels, Coyote would be somewhere in the mix. These are fun and thought-provoking novels, and I'm personally glad to see that they'll be available for new readers to discover.

Steele began the series in 2001, and earned considerable acclaim over the course of their run. John Clute notes in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia that "Coyote represents a serious take on the possibilities of a human future in the universe," and described Steele as "an author whose grasp is broad, and focused toward futures in which Homo sapiens has a chance of flourishing. For this alone, he is an important representative of mature Genre SF."

The stories were well-regarded by readers too: both "Stealing Alabama" and "The Days Between" were nominated for the 2002 Hugo and Locus awards in their categories – "Stealing Alabama" earned that year's Asimovs Readers Awards, and was also nominated for a Nebula (Days Between would earn a Nebula nod the following year), while "Coming to Coyote" and "Liberty Journals" were also finalists for the Asimovs Readers Awards. As a novel, Coyote was a finalist for both the 2003 Locus and Prometheus Awards. A handful of stories that made up Coyote Rising also earned a slew of nominations for a variety of awards.

Despite that acclaim and goodwill, the novels eventually fell out of print. In his post, Steele explained that there were some complicated reasons, which he expanded in an email: Ace Books let the physical editions fall out of print, but the eBooks were available for a while. When Steele's longtime agent, Sterling Lord's Martha Millard, abruptly retired in 2018, he was also dealing with his own health issues, and "wasn't paying much attention to his backlist."

Following his recovery, Steele explained that he faced new troubles as he worked to rebuild his career: "for a brief time I was represented by a literary agent who persuaded me that he could get better royalties for the Coyote books from another publisher than what I was presently getting from Penguin, if I’d let him seek rights-reversion for the entire series from Ace."

That plan didn't pan out: Steele says that this agent didn't shop the book around, but instead planned to publish them himself and charge Steele for the expenses against his royalties. Steele was eventually able to get out of the situation, and returned to his old agency at Sterling Lord. From there, he was able to bring the Coyote novels to Open Road Media, which was already publishing other books from his back catalog.

But the episode lasted years, meaning that the books weren't readily available to readers. While used copies of the books are generally available, that's different from a publisher actively selling them: there's nobody to make sure that they're available in stores. Readers who might be looking to download the eBook right away would find that the option wasn't available: the crucial "Available Instantly" Kindle link was missing from the product pages. As a result, the episode means years of absent potential royalties for Steele.

With the Coyote novels coming back to print, they'll once again be readily available to a new group of readers, and maybe, it could lead to a return to the world for some new adventures.

Steele left the series close out in 2011 with Hex, a standalone book about an expedition to a Dyson sphere built by an alien civilization known as the danui, who appeared in the other Coyote novels. He moved onto other projects, publishing a series of books featuring Edmond Hamilton's pulp hero Captain Future (Avengers of the Moon, Captain Future in Love, The Guns of Pluto, 1,500 Light Years From Home, The Horror at Jupiter, Lost Apollo, and The Multiverse War.) 

He wrote some other other hard science fiction novels along the way: 2016's Arkwright (here's my review from when it was first published) and 2021's Sanctuary, both of which followed a similar path as Coyote: stitched together from shorter works he published in magazines.

Steele explained to me that he has some other Coyote stories that he had published that he hadn't collected yet, which he wants to bring together as a “Tales of Coyote” (no pun intended) mosaic collection."

There could be more on the horizon: "I think I’m ready to return to Coyote," Steele told me, saying that he's "made extensive notes for a new novel." His prior agent had told him that he didn't think there was much demand for another Coyote novel, an assessment that he's now questioning. A publisher hasn't materialized for either project, but he says "if a good publisher offered me a decent advance for a major project like this, drop me a line."

Hopefully, one is out there: Coyote has brought some fantastic adventures already, and there's lots of space for one more visit.