by John Fockler, Jr.

    At first glance, the title of this presentation appears self-contradictory.  How could science fiction, typically set in the future, have anything to do with the Old West, our catchall phrase for a place bounded geographically by the Mexican and Canadian borders, the Mississippi River, and the Pacific Ocean, and a time roughly defined chronologically as from 1848 to 1900? 

     First, to be clear, keep in mind that we are speaking not so much of the actual Old West as of its mythological counterpart.  For the most part, the Old West we are talking about here is not the Old West of Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, and Wild Bill Hickok, but that of Bret Harte, Buffalo Bill Cody, and John Ford.  As the character says in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,  "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." As such, we will be referencing film, television, and literature much more than sober history.  Most Americans' image of the Old West is far more the product of a century and a half of Western fiction than it is of the real events.  Some of the crafters of these fictional portrayals (again, John Ford comes to mind) were fairly respectful of the facts.  Others, even many who wrote contemporaneously with the era, were much less so.

    The real Old West was a much more prosaic place than its fictional portrayals.  While the 19th century frontier struck visitors from the East as a lawless place where every man wore a gun and the fastest draw won, the truth is that even going constantly armed was a fairly rare practice.  No real-life rancher or farmer ever used his weapon as often as Bonanza's Cartwrights (Dortort) or The Rifleman's Lucas McCain (Laven).  Probably no one has done a study on it, but odds are no real Old West town was any more dangerous than certain neighborhoods in today's Chicago or New Orleans.

    The first thing that Western stories and science-fiction have in common is that, as literary genres, they are defined by their setting rather than their content.  As we noted, a Western story must be set in the Old West, or at least in neighboring territory geographically or chronologically.  A story about Daniel Boone might be considered a Western even though it doesn't quite fit within the narrow borders, since that story will address the demands of settling new territory.  Likewise, The Magnificent Seven and The Undefeated unquestionably qualify even though both are set mostly across the border in Mexico, and the former is even based on a Japanese film. 

     A large fraction of science fiction, and most of its best-known examples, whether television's Star Trek or E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark of Space, are set in the future. Exceptions are not uncommon, certainly. Robert A. Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line," was set in the year in which it was written, and time travel stories and alternate history stories, both considered to be subgenres of science fiction, typically take place largely in the past.  But the default, so to speak, is a setting in the very advanced future.

    So, for both science fiction and Westerns, expectations about setting are clear and precise. But the story content of either a Western or a science-fiction story is effectively unlimited.  A detective story must feature an investigator trying to solve a crime.  But give the detective a black mask, a palomino horse, and a Native-American sidekick (1) and it is still a detective story, but it is also a Western.  Set the story in the roofed-over cities of a future Earth and give him a robot partner, as Isaac Asimov did, and once again, the story is still a detective story, but it is also science fiction.  The same point could be made about love stories, coming-of-age stories, or any other type of content.  With the right setting, any one of them could be—have been—either Westerns or science fiction.

    What is nonetheless surprising is that the one genre can readily transpose itself into the other, an affinity I discovered on two particular occasions during late-night TV viewing.  The first instance was the movie Outland. In this 1981 film, Sean Connery plays a marshal assigned to a mining colony on one of the moons of Jupiter.  He investigates a lethal drug that is killing miners and ends in a showdown against a handful of futuristic desperadoes.  The film is a deliberate, and thinly disguised, remake of the classic Gary Cooper Western High Noon.

    The second is the 2013 TV series Defiance, which aired on the Syfy cable channel (O'Bannon et al.). Defiance was set on an Earth altered by alien action; most of its original people, it is implied, have been killed, established social order has broken down, and members of various alien races have arrived as refugees.  The title town, which rests over the ruins of St. Louis, is home to a mysterious town marshal, a crafty gambler, a beautiful woman who operates a saloon and brothel, and assorted miners, drifters, and farmers.  While set in the future, the town of Defiance is the descendent of the Tombstone, North Fork or Dodge City of dozens of Western movies and television series.

     But why would science-fiction writers or producers return to the Old West for inspiration?  What's the connection?  The most obvious point of commonality is the idea of the frontier.  The history of the United States from our earliest days until about 1900 is the story of people with a background founded in western civilizations moving ever westward across the North American continent, displacing the Native-American population, and building their farms, mines and towns.  According to legend, much more so than historical fact, the spread, especially from after the American Civil War, outran the reach of law and order, leaving plenty of elbow room for the train robber and the intrepid lawman with the fastest gun.

    The stock characters commonly found in Western fiction were generated by the circumstances of the frontier and its contrast, real or imagined, to a more settled, more conventional, more judgmental world back east.  There is the "fallen man," often a professional such as a doctor or newspaperman, who has been driven west by alcoholism or debt.  There is the "soiled dove," often with a heart of gold.  There is the crooked gambler, the unscrupulous mine owner, or the wealthy rancher who wants to drive off the farmers who would fence off part of the open range.  There is the "dude" from back East, naïve and innocent, who frequently must learn how to carry a gun and stand up for himself.  Many of these characters are as old as Bret Harte, a founding figure of Western fiction, and remain staples of the genre to this day.

    If the Old West was the old frontier, then space is, as you may have heard, "The final frontier."  Indeed, when Gene Roddenberry was selling Star Trek to Desilu Productions in 1964, he said the series would be "like Wagon Train, a Wagon Train to the stars" ("Star Trek"). In the early 1960s, Western series like Wagon Train, Bonanza and Gunsmoke were extremely popular, and drawing comparisons with such a successful format was a strong selling point.  As Star Trek evolved, the series seemed to owe less to the Western than it did to the Cold War, then at its height, but there are a great many other, stronger examples of the tie.

    Before there was Defiance, there was Firefly (Whedon), a short-lived series from 2002-2003 that has developed a kind of a cult following in recent years.  Firefly, which was a deliberate attempt to meld the Western and sci-fi genres, seems to me to owe a lot to John Ford's classic 1939 Western Stagecoach.  The series is set on a tramp space-going cargo ship that earns its living, legal or illegal, going from one frontier outpost to another.  The regular characters are a collection of misfits that correspond in some ways to those in Stagecoach, or in Harte's 1869 short story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat."  The captain is a military veteran of a "lost cause" like John Carradine's character in Stagecoach or John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.  There's the requisite "soiled dove," an itinerant preacher, a "gun-for-hire," and a mysterious doctor who is on the run from the law with his sister.  The main characters in this show do go armed most of the time, and the pilot episode features a shootout right out of My Darling Clementine or some other cinematic version of the shootout at the OK Corral.

    Robert Heinlein's novel Time Enough for Love includes several sections that stand on their own as independent stories.  In one of these, "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter," the main character, Woodrow Wilson Smith, alias Lazarus Long, et al., takes two mule-drawn covered wagons across a virgin plain to a new valley where he and his new wife will homestead.  Pick up the novel and turn immediately to these pages, and except for a few mentions of high-technology explosives and the fact that his mules can talk, and there would be little to tell you that you were not reading a story set in the Great Plains of the 1870s.  Heinlein goes to great trouble to explain, convincingly, why people who could cross space in ships that exceed the speed of light would nevertheless find it necessary to cross a planet in a covered wagon.

    Ben Bova's short-story collection Sam Gunn Unlimited also portrays a human future that looks a lot like the American frontier.  In this book, a female journalist travels the human-settled solar system trying to track down the story of the famous Sam Gunn, pilot, entrepreneur, con-man, and curmudgeon.  She seeks out various people who knew Gunn in various places, gradually piecing together a complete picture of the man.  The various venues in which she conducts her interviews remind the reader of frontier towns, with their raucous saloons, brothels and gambling houses, and Sam's history is the history of the opening up of the frontier of space.  The man her inquiries reveal is exactly the kind often drawn to the raw frontier: freethinking, free-spirited, and most comfortable with a lot of elbow room.

    Another science-fiction author who clearly draws on the Old West for inspiration is Mike Resnick.  In Santiago, the title character is an elusive criminal, the "Inner Frontier's" most-wanted man.  Sebastian Nightingale Cain, famed bounty hunter (another staple Western character), is hunting him for the huge reward, and in the process must evade or kill competitors, crooks, and (her again?) a female journalist who wants Santiago's story.

    Sometimes, the Western DNA trail is subtler.  In Heinlein's novel Beyond This Horizon, the setting, except for a scene in John Muir National Monument, is as modern as most in science-fiction, and the plot touches on genetic engineering, reincarnation, and telepathy.  But in this novel, the civil society is an armed one.  Most men, and some women, never appear in public without their side arms, and dueling is an accepted part of life, much like the showdowns on the main street that are the staple of so many Western movies and TV shows.

    Every once in a while, science fiction has taken a satirical swipe at the Western itself.  In 1957, Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson published a collection of science-fiction stories called Earthman's Burden, featuring a race of beings called Hokas.  Hokas will adopt roles they find in a work of fiction and completely lose themselves in it, becoming the characters that they play.  In the first story, "The Sheriff of Canyon Gulch," a human military officer finds himself among a band of Hokas who have convinced themselves that they are living in the Old West, and each Hoka has adopted an appropriate persona.  The human is forced to play along, and many of the clichés of Western movies (especially the bad ones) are lampooned.

    While the "founding fathers" of science-fiction as we know it today were a Frenchman and an Englishman (Jules Verne and H. G. Wells), a good case can be made that, from the 1920s on, Americans have dominated the field and largely made it their own.  Of course, even though a few people from outside U.S. borders have contributed to the field, the Western, in literature, in electronic media, and on the screen, has also been a uniquely American field.  The common point, as we've now seen, is the idea of the frontier.

    The frontier has been a defining motif of American life.  Often, it was the experience of the frontier that turned Germans, Irishmen, Englishmen, or Frenchman into Americans.  It provided elbow room for the discontented, the unruly, and yes, even the lawless.

    In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," presented to a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner said:

American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West. (Turner)

     In the future, if humankind does not fail the test, we will venture out into the solar system, and eventually, into the galaxy.  Once again, we will know a frontier, where space is vast and free for the taking and law and order are more tenuous, perhaps more likely to depend on one man's or woman's strong arm and quick mind.  Once again, the restless, the dissatisfied, and the rebellious will be drawn there.

    As Americans, most of us descend from people who were restless enough and dissatisfied enough with where they were to cut their ties with home, friends, and neighbors, pack up, and face a trip that was long and sometimes dangerous to settle in the New World.  Even those of us whose ancestors were dragged here against their will descend from people who were tough enough and stubborn enough to survive the Middle Passage and decades or centuries of subjugation.  This legacy, I think, is partly responsible for the attraction the frontier holds for us.  It often makes us romanticize about a time, again one in the past or in the future, when a person accepts a maximum of risk in exchange for a maximum of freedom.

    In Heinlein's 1955 novel Tunnel In the Sky (which also has some echoes of the Old West), a teacher offers this observation to a young student:

I'm telling you straight: I think you've been born into the wrong age. [… ] I think you are a romantic.  Now this is a very romantic age, so there is no room in it for romantics. A hundred years ago you would have made a banker or lawyer or professor and you could have worked out your romanticism by reading fanciful tales and dreaming about what you might have been if you hadn't had the misfortune to be born into a humdrum period.  But this happens to be a period when adventure and romance are a part of daily existence.  Naturally it takes very practical people to cope with it. (8)

    The age we live in is not a particularly romantic one.  Earthly frontiers, saving only the sea, are long settled, and space as an outlet for the restless is still in our future.  Perhaps for just this reason, books, movies, and television stories set in more romantic eras are popular.  The last great heyday of the Western ended in the early 1970s, but the best examples of the form are still watched or read eagerly.  Science-fiction, especially in movies and television, has never been more popular, as epic series like Star Trek are inspiring new films.

     The memory of the frontier experience is what draws us to the films of John Ford or the novels of Louis L'Amour.  I think that it's this same cultural memory that draws us to the science-fiction worlds of Gene Roddenberry, Robert A. Heinlein, or Ben Bova.  It's this longing for the next frontier that continues to inspire science-fiction authors and producers to seek the echoes of the Old West.

Note

(1) The Lone Ranger originated as a radio serial on WXYZ, Detroit, in 1933.  There have been many additions through the 2013 feature film.

Works Cited

Author's Biography

    John Fockler, Jr., discovered a book, The Runaway Robot, by Lester del Rey, at the age of seven or eight, and that discovery began a lifetime affection for science-fiction in just about any media.  He claims to be an "original Trekker," a fan of TV's Star Trek since the show first began airing in 1966.  It was not long after that that he was introduced to the Western genre, then in its "golden age" on television.

    A 1979 graduate of Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, with a degree in history, Fockler has served in a variety of jobs in hotels over the last 35 years and managed properties in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  He is currently part of the management team in a property in Austintown, Ohio.

    Fockler has been active in the Libertarian Party and has twice been a candidate for political office.  He is currently vice-chair of the Libertarian Party of Ohio's Central Committee and serves as deputy director of communications.

   Past president of the Torch Clubs in Youngstown and Akron, he maintains membership in both.  This is believed to be his fourteenth appearance in Torch magazine.

    "Echoes of the Old West in Science Fiction" was presented to the Youngstown Torch Club on November 17, 2014.