Coyote Horizon (Coyote Series #5) Book

It's been a few years since I read the original Coyote trilogy and I was really happy to get back into that universe. The combination of frontier life and survival with high-tech science was extremely thrilling. But, as with any series the story evolves and advances. As the coyote stories progressed modern (and futuristic) technology became more commonplace in the lives of the characters, yet still with the wilderness outpost aspect of it.

Coyote Horizon continues with this technological progress, which I guess is OK, but I kind of missed the real roughing-it feel of the earlier novels. On the other hand, there were some interesting "old technology" machines in the story that I didn't feel comfortable with having a place in the Coyote universe. Particularly coal powered boats and such... It's never mentioned where any coal mines are on the moon and there was never any mention of the moon's ancient history, but even if there are coal deposits I would think that within the next 300 years we'd be able to develop technology that would replace coal, even on remote planetoids. Granted the original colonists were from only 60 years into the future from now, but later generations had the benefits of hundreds of years worth of new scientific research. I understand some things reverting back to antiquated technology (firearms, animal labor, sailing ships, etc.) but coal powered technology just seemed to be a strange departure from the other relatively clean tech used in the novels.

Anyway, that small gripe aside, my only other major issue with the novel was the 'preachy' aspect of it. I don't want to say much to avoid spoilers, but I will quote from the Acknowledgements: "The religious and philosophical arguments posed in this novel were, in large part, inspired by The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan." And many times throughout the novel the reader is nearly bashed over the head with the philosophies presented by these two authors. I felt that religion was really not given a fair chance, nor portrayed realistically. There is a lot of gray area in people's characters, but when it came to the dogma I felt like it was a very clear cut line on where Allen Steele's opinions lie.

Otherwise I really enjoyed the book. I would give it about 3.5 stars, but since I can't give it a half star I'll round up to 4. I'm really excited about the next book though because it seems like there might be even more actual exploration involved (there was some in Coyote Horizon, but a lot of it was just to set up the philosophical ideas in the novel).