Allen Steele encountered “Star Trek” when he was 8 years old, when one of his sisters gave him James Blish’s first novelization of the series as a Christmas present. Because the show’s first season wasn’t aired in his hometown of Nashville, Tenn., he didn’t actually see an episode of “Star Trek” until a year later. Since then, he has become a Hugo-winning science fiction writer with a dozen novels and four collections of short stories to his credit. His most recent novels are the Coyote trilogy: Coyote, Coyote Rising and Coyote Frontier. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and two dogs.