W is for Wagon Train to the Stars

When Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek series back in the 60s, Westerns were all the rage.  Consequently, he pitched his show as a “wagon train to the stars,” where a bunch of quirky characters on an awesome starship travel from adventure town to interstellar adventure town, exploring and pioneering the final frontier.

Sound familiar?  Yeah, I thought so.  The concept proved so catchy that it’s been redone time and again, from Battlestar Galactica to Firefly to Doctor Who.  Even though Westerns aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be, many of its tropes are so well suited to Science Fiction that they drive the genre even today.

For example, adventure planets.  In a typical Western, the characters travel from town to town, with a different adventure in each one.  Well, in Science Fiction, the characters do the same thing, except that they’re traveling from planet to planet.  And really, if you’ve got the ability to travel to other worlds, how can you not have an adventure in each one?

A large reason for the Western / Science Fiction crossover is the whole concept of space as the final frontier, which we explored earlier in this series with I is for Interstellar.  There’s a very real sense of manifest destiny in the space exploration community, not because of humano-ethnocentrism (heck, we don’t even know we’re not alone in our local stellar neighborhood), but to ensure humanity’s long-term survival.  The parallels between that and the westward movement in 19th century America aren’t perfect, but they do exist.

Similarly, as we explored in R is for Rebel, the notion of space as the final frontier has a special resonance with the American audience.  The days of the old frontier may be over, but its spirit lives on in our culture, from guns to road trips to our glorification of the rugged, self-made individual.  Today’s Science Fiction, especially the space-focused SF of Space Opera, grew out of the adventure fiction of the pulps, which thrived on that frontier American ethos.

In fiction, the frontier can still be found in two major genres: the Western, which is historical and therefore more backward-looking, and Science fiction, which is futuristic and therefore more forward-looking.  Because Science Fiction isn’t burdened with all of the historical baggage of the traditional Western, it’s a much more flexible medium for story, readily adaptable to contemporary issues and concerns.

For example, where Star Trek echoes the large-scale nation to nation conflicts of the Cold War (Federation vs. Klingons and Romulans), the new Battlestar Galactica series echoes the much more asymmetrical conflicts of the post-9/11 world (Cylon agents who are indistinguishable from humans and may not even know that they are cylons).  At the same time, the wholesale co-opting of Western tropes enables a latent sense of nostalgia, evident in the look and feel of Firefly, or the famous opening lines from Star Wars: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

My first real experience with a wagon train to the stars type of story was probably Star Trek: Voyager, which I watched religiously with my dad every Wednesday night until maybe 9th or 10th grade.  The Western-borrowed tropes are somewhat more muted in that series, but they exist, especially the planetville / adventure towns stuff.  However, it wasn’t until Firefly and Serenity that I really experienced the awesomeness of a true Space Western.  There were a lot of things in Firefly that I really loved, especially the character interactions, the gun-toting action scenes, and especially the starship Serenity.  There were some things I didn’t like so much, like the fact that every planet is basically Wyoming, but overall I really enjoyed the show.

It wasn’t until I started getting more acquainted with straight-up Westerns that I saw the real potential for crossover between the genres.  Stories about mountain men like Jeremiah Johnson really captured my imagination–what would this look like if it were set in space?  In that sense, I came to the Space Western more from the classic Science Fiction side first, rather than the pulp adventure stuff.  But once I discovered the crossover connection, it naturally found a way into my own work.

That’s basically how the story idea for Star Wanderers first came to me.  I was lying on my bed, daydreaming about having my own starship like the Serenity, when I wondered what it would be like for a starship pilot to get roped into an accidental marriage like in the movie Jeremiah Johnson?  The collision between the two ideas was like a supernova exploding in my brain.  I rolled out of bed and started writing, coming up with chapter one of Outworlder almost exactly like it’s written today.  And the more invested I became in those characters and that world, the more the story grew.  I’m writing Part VII right now (Reproach, from Noemi and Mariya’s POV), and so long as people read them I’ll keep writing more.

Genre mash-ups and crossovers are a great way to keep things fresh and come up with some really interesting stories.  Some genres aren’t very well suited for each other (Erotica and Middle Grade, for example), but others come together so well that they seem almost complementary.  That certainly seems to be the case with Westerns and Science Fiction, at least here in the United States where the spirit of the frontier still echoes through the popular culture.