"All The Lone Ranger Episodes"

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

Part of my childhood has just been encapsulated. Tully tells his companions that they are at Movie Flats. After listing several cinema films shot there, he adds:

"'...and all the Lone Ranger episodes...'" (p. 525)

I watched the Lone Ranger in the 1950s. Tell my 1955 self, "In 2015, you will read the phrase '...all the Lone Ranger episodes...' in a novel and will immediately quote this phrase on a worldwide computer network."

Children enjoy fights and action scenes without any understanding of their contexts or even sometimes of the characters' conversations. In fact, I preferred the Range Rider's fighting technique to that of the Lone Ranger. I used to like a feature film that began with a narrator's voice summarizing a period of American history as long as the film climaxed somewhere like the Alamo, the OK Corral, Little Big Horn or Fort Sumner.

A more recent film showed that the gunfight at OK Corral was an incident, not a climax, and the film ended with a reprise of the Earps and Holliday walking down the main street of Tombstone into history and legend.

Anderson and Stirling write good fight scenes but would not be worth our attention if that was all they wrote.