This final installment in the main sequence of the Coyote novels is a fitting denouement for the trilogy. It lowers the curtains on a quality series from an insightful author without betraying the spirit of the whole.
Having beat back various severe, ideological threats from Earth, the Coyote colonists, now organized into a technologically primitive but intellectually free republic, finally possess enough stability to set about living their industrious lives without fear of external dangers. But no sooner have they settled into their free-market utopian plans when a new technology from Earth makes it possible for virtually instantaneous travel between Coyote, the pure, new hope, and Earth, the environmentally degraded cradle of humanity. For while this new development offers Coyote opportunities to trade for all the high-tech conveniences it lacks, in exchange for providing natural resources it has in such abundance, resources depleted on Earth, it has also opened the door to a tragic crush of refugees fleeing Earth, and its collapsing climate, for Coyote, and its fresh shores.
In Coyote, Mr. Steele's ragtag band of heroes defied fascism and won. In Coyote Rising, they stood up to radical socialism and won. In Coyote Frontier, Mr. Steele sets aside political philosophy for a more balanced discussion centered on both the nature of trade and the thorny morality surrounding the idea of the greater good. Is it right to plunder a planet's natural resources in order to create trade goods that can be sold for profit? Is it right to burden that same planet with an unchecked flood of refugees fleeing a manmade, ecological disaster? Who has the right to claim ownership of land? Who has the right to deny desperate people a new beginning? The first two Coyote novels pleased because their characters were polarized into camps of good and evil, free and tyrannical. Coyote Frontier pleases because it graduates from such simplicities to the grayness of adult ambiguity. In this way, it pays off what captain Lee bravely began when he stole the URSS Alabama, realizing a fully fledged world and its band of freedom-worshipping, capitalist, democratist frontiersmen. Satisfying. (3/5 Stars)
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