Allen Steele has changed his story telling in this account of the Coyote universe. The earlier volumes are more linked and overlapping short stories, focussing on different characters, while SPINDRIFT is definitely a novel: in effect, told in flashback after the re-arrival of the Galileo. So we read how the crew was put together, the voyage through the star-gate to the distant stars, the descent of the module with its reduced crew to the surface of a strange asteroid, and what happened to the mother ship in the meantime. And, of course, how the reduced crew manage to return.

Writing on a slightly shorter scale, Steele takes us through the political foundations of colonies, in shades of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, through to the discovery of the big strange object in echoes of, say, Greg Bear's EON. In the background is an earth still dividing up between two or three shape-shifting super-states, which seem to have been true from George Orwell's last days through to Bruce Sterling's in more modern terms. And once we are on the star ship we are in the realms of paranoid captains and distrustful lieutenants; fortunately, said captain never achieves the opportunity to put his secret plans into practise or something nastier might have returned to earth through the star-gate, nevertheless the failures of that style of management have been infamous from the days of HMS Bounty through those of the USS Caine. In echoes of the back-cover blurb what I am doing, though, is avoiding describing the asteroid on which our three heroes land, what they find there, and the much bigger implications of what then happens to them. Even if a lot of SPINDRIFT seems unoriginal it would not be sporting to give it away. On the other hand the last serious plot element has a significance on Earth, and it is one that long ago John W Campbell raised: what do you create when you need a warning sign that anyone or anything can understand means "Keep Away"? In the case of SPINDRIFT that question is not answered well and becomes the catastrophe of the story. Exploring it would have added a lot more to Allen Steele's invention.