Out in the Western Galaxy...

[demiurgent]

You think of things while hammering out Western flavored text. When you're a big ol' writing geek and SF geek, you start realizing just how much Science Fiction story potential there is in the Old West.

I don't mean setting stories of Aliens in Tombstone or the like. As Ken MacLeod said (and which I read by way of Patrick Neilsen Hayden's blog), "History is the trade secret of science fiction." There's tons of stories to be set on faraway worlds here, with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson giving way to far future counterparts, and with the events of their adventures being followed almost exactly but the serial numbers filed off.

It seems likely the entire story of the Earp brothers' ill-fated move to Tombstone and all the events that followed it could easily be made a Science Fiction epic, with almost all the readers never having any idea they were reading a rehash unless the author was good enough to point it out. I say that because I can count the number of Science Fiction fans of my own acquaintance who even know who Ike Clanton is, much less the root causes of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

(This doesn't count the Science Fiction writers of my acquaintance, naturally -- SF writers are an eclectic bunch, who tend to know great heaping gobs of everything under the sun, and can surprise you with facts ranging far and wide. They may in fact be the closest thing to Renaissance Men in literature today. This is no doubt why Science Fiction isn't considered 'literature' at all. But I digress.)

Still, even if one owns up to the source material (which to me would be only fair), the novel that emerged could be very, very good indeed. Which makes me consider writing it.

After this is finished. Ahh, commissioned work.

Comments

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the astronomer who was my honors seminar instructor (now passed on, alas), who talked about how Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Westerns. In fact, everything he wrote was a Western; he wrote Westerns set in the West, in the jungles of Africa, and on Mars and Venus.

Also kind of reminds me of how, in the Afterword to Cross the Stars (http://www.baen.com/library/0671578219/0671578219.htm), David Drake mentioned how he'd thought the Odyssey would make a great Western before eventually writing it up as a science-fiction Hammer's Slammers story.

And then there's the way Samurai movies tended to end up as Western movies with very little alteration to the plot at all...

I'd guess that history is the trade secret of just about any literature, really.

[slog.livejournal.com]

johnny cash, how appropriate :)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Ring of Fire could mean so many things in Space....