The River Horses by Allen Steele

In Allen Steele’s novella, The River Horses, Marie Montero and Lars Thompson are banished from the colony of New Boston on the frontier planet, Coyote. The savant Manuel Castro—a man who has had himself transferred into a mechanical body—chooses to go with them for reasons that Marie does not understand and Lars does not care about. As they fulfill the magistrates’ mandate of exploring the frontier, the three encounter a surprise: another group of travelers. Things play out in a way that Marie never expected, and she becomes closer to Manny at the same time that she has to make choices about her relationship with her lover, Lars. When the river horses find them and the magistrates take an interest in what the explorers have been doing, the choices become much more difficult.

The cover copy of the novella notes that “there remain stories about humankind’s new home that have not been told,” and The River Horses has a feel to it that very much supports that idea. Nothing that happens really breaks new ground in the realm of science fiction, and it’s fundamentally a frontier story; the characters could be replaced by ones from the Wild West, and it would work equally well. For readers who are fans of Steele’s other work, I would think that The River Horses is a fun little revisiting of a world they already love.

As a standalone, however, it never quite worked for me. Part of this, certainly, has to do with simple personal preference. As a reader, I become frustrated by stories where advanced technology and new worlds seem to exist only to give us a new backdrop as we play out the same stories of bigotry and gender-based oppression that we had in our Wild West days. Without having read Steele’s other novels, I can’t reassure myself that this really is a frontier story and things eventually change in this society; unfortunately, I also don’t care enough about the world to simply want to read about it for no reason other than further immersion in the setting.

Steele paints a vivid picture of the world of Coyote, bringing home to the reader the simultaneous thrill and terror of unexplored territory, and the relationships that the characters build feel realistic and plausible. Part of the story is told through Marie’s journal entries, which pull the reader even more solidly into the setting and into sympathy for Marie. In the end, though, it feels as though the characters are almost violated by what happens. The growth that we’ve watched Marie go through seems unnecessary, and even before the novella ends, Marie’s vitality has faded away. Again, for those able to put this novella into the larger context of Steele’s work about Coyote, this story may fill in important gaps in the stage of the planet’s settling, but for the reader who is unfamiliar with Coyote aside from The River Horses, the ending doesn’t quite satisfy.

Publisher: Subterranean Press (November 2007)
Hardcover: 100 pages (signed, limited edition)
ISBN: 1596061324