-Jack Schaefer, Shane IN Schaefer, Shane and Other Stories (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1964), pp. 7-114 AT 16, p. 114.
And, in interstellar sf, a man like Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry can fly down to a planet out of the heart of the great glowing galaxy and when his work is done fly back whence he came. There is a comparison to be made between the wide open spaces of the Old West and galactic space and, in our childhoods, there may not have been a major difference between Red Indians and green Martians.
James Blish wrote some uncollected stories published in Western pulp magazines. See Some Early Blish. Poul Anderson wrote no Westerns although Chapter XIV of The Boat Of A Million Years, set in America in 1872, features Comanches.
I used to like Westerns, which were everywhere on TV, in films and comics, in my childhood but preferred sf. See The Eagle. That seminal comic featured Riders Of The Range but also Pilot Of The Future. Jeff Arnold and Luke were Pat Garrett's deputies when he killed William Bonney and were scouts for Custer. The Treens prefigured the Merseians.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've seen Westerns on TV and read some Western novels, but, like you, I preferred science fictions. Probably because I'm inclined to think of Westerns as being too nostalgic, backward looking, even archaic. No, I preferred the SF of writers like Anderson, Asimov, Heinlein, Norton, etc., as a boy because they were future oriented and outward looking. But I can see how Western sheriffs, marshals, and loners can resemble Dominic Flandry.
Sean
Westerns were written -during- the period of the classic trans-Mississippi frontier; Kit Carson, the famous frontier pathfinder and scout, was known to read penny dreadfuls purportedly about himself and his adventures.
(Asked if any of them are true, he replied: "Sometimes, but just by accident.")
Davy Crockett, "King of the Wild Frontier", who died at the Alamo, sat through plays about his own frontier exploits while he was in Washington DC as a Congressman -- reportedly laughing uproariously, and he may well have modeled the "frontier" costume he wore on his final expedition to Texas on the ones the actors wore while portraying him.
This is a long tradition. Hawkins and Drake and the other Elizabethan sea-dogs were the subject of ballads and fictionalized pamphlets during their own lifetimes.
The stories and the deeds played off each other.
By the time the open-range cattle frontier of the 1870's and 1880's was in full swing, the cowboys and ranchers and prospectors were fully aware that they were living out a myth, and played up to it.
This is obvious if you read Teddy Roosevelt's account of his own ranching days in the Dakota Territory. It was perfectly real -- he raised cattle for sale (and lost money, by the way); he fought bandits and brought them in; he had a feud with a neighboring rancher who hired killer gunmen (and was a mad French Count, by the way).
And all the time he was consciously living out the dream he'd acquired reading accounts of frontiersmen as a small boy in Manhattan.
When he showed up on the frontier in the early 1880's, he was dressed in a jaw-droppingly dudified suit of fringed leather from Brooks Brothers and had a bowie knife engraved and decorated by Tiffany. He had to do some very demonstratively tough and courageous things to live -that- down!
(Among other things, he once leapt on a mountain lion and stabbed it to death -- a record one, too, over 215 pounds, not exceeded until the 1980's).
Paul and Sean:
As a kind of inversion, I'll mention that Louis L'Amour, best known for Western novels, not only also wrote some historical fiction for other settings — The Walking Drum is set in 12th-century Europe and the Near East — but The Californios includes a villain getting an absolutely not mundane comeuppance in which time flows differently for him than for everyone else in the story, so he's had years or decades stranded somewhere in what for the others was just a few days. (Wherever he was, it left his mind broken.)
And then there's The Haunted Mesa, set in the present-day Southwest. Certain Native American legends concern a hellish afterworld, which the Maya called Xibalba or Shibalba. In L'Amour's tale, Shibalba is actually an alternate world, sometimes in contact with our own. The evil dictatorship of Shibalba doesn't seem to dream they can conquer us, but they do have agents planted here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_Mesa
Mr Stirling,
Your explorers of Venus know that they are heroes of fiction back on Earth.
Paul.
Paul: yeah, that's not uncommon. Fiction and reality continually bounce off each other.
For example, the Conan story "The Phoenix on the Sword" was an almost line-by-line retelling of the authoritative account of the death of Pizzaro, the conqueror of Peru (in an internal fight among the Spanish after they beat the Incas).
Conversely, the conquistadores were all inveterate readers of late-medieval "heroic fantasy" romances about brave knights fighting evil sorcerers and infidels and rescuing beautiful captive princesses.
(Well, most of them did -- Pizzaro was probably illiterate.)
Dear Mr. Stirling and DAVID,
Mr. Stirling: Certainly! I have heard of how Spanish Conquistadors, Elizabethan pirates (which is what Drake was, after all), and American frontiersmen were either fans of heroic romances or read fantasies about themselves (as was the case with Davy Crockett and Kit Carson). And, yes, Theodore Roosevelt longed to live similarly and achieve similar deeds. And actually did so (probably using that Tiffany engraved Bowie knife)!
And Francisco Pizarro may have illiterate, but he lived a life straight from one of those Medieval romances! Conquering a great empire and being almost as hard to kill as Rasputin and King Kong when his enemies assassinated him (despite his advanced age!).
And it was amusing to see how the heroes of THE SKY PEOPLE knew fanciful stories were being written about them back on Earth. And the British Intelligence service of Rudyard Kipling's novel KIM seems to have been an inspiration for the fans who founded the first British Intelligence agency.
David: I've actually read Louis L'Amour's THE HAUNTED MESA. I loved the basic theme, an alternate impacting on ours in the West. But I was disappointed by how the author developed the idea. The POV character or "hero" spent an inorinate amount of time dithering indecisively about what to do. And the possible threat from that other universe was never satisfactorily or convincingly developed. I far preferred Holger Danske or the Matucheks in the stories Anderson wrote.
Sean
" "The Phoenix on the Sword" was an almost line-by-line retelling of the authoritative account of the death of Pizzaro, the conqueror of Peru"
Do read "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" available here.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24091/24091-h/24091-h.htm
As Stanley Schmidt wrote in his introduction to "Analog's Lighter Side" which includes the story.
"There is even one story here which you may not realize is a joke at all until you reach the end -- at which point you'll see that the whole thing is is own punch line"
Kaor, Jim!
It does seem very much worth reading!
Ad astra! Sean
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