Saddle up for the strange! This genre mashes up the grit of classic westerns with the mind-bending possibilities of science fiction. Grab your hat and let’s explore the wildest frontier of all. Curated by Jessica Schiefelbein.
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The Gunslinger by Stephen King
In the first book of this series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger.
He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede
Eff was born a thirteenth child. Her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This means he’s supposed to possess amazing talent — and she’s supposed to bring only bad things to her family and her town. Undeterred, her family moves to the frontier, where her father will be a professor of magic at a school perilously close to the magical divide that separates settlers from the beasts of the wild.
Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore
From Christopher Moore, author of Fluke, comes a quirky, irreverent novel of love, myth, metaphysics, outlaw biking, angst, and outrageous redemption.
As a boy growing up in Montana, he was Samson Hunts Alone — until a deadly misunderstanding with the law forced him to flee the Crow reservation at age fifteen. Today he is Samuel Hunter, a successful Santa Barbara insurance salesman with a Mercedes, a condo, and a hollow, invented life. Then one day, shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday, destiny offers him the dangerous gift of love — in the exquisite form of Calliope Kincaid — and a curse in the unheralded appearance of an ancient Indian god by the name of Coyote. Coyote, the trickster, has arrived to transform tranquility into chaos, to reawaken the mystical storyteller within Sam … and to seriously screw up his existence in the process.
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.
Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history—or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice.
One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will.
After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.
Secrets of the Wastelands by Bliss Lomax
Jim Morningstar leads a group of scientists on an expedition to the wasteland of Pueblo Grande, near the entrance to a carefully hidden valley which no white man had ever discovered. The Chinese knew of the valley in the wasteland and the vast treasure it held. They called it Peaceful Valley – they had discovered it after persecution in the American West forced them to take refuge there, and they carefully guarded the entrance. After a couple of questionable accidents, the murder of the expedition’s cook, and the disappearance of one of the scientists, Jim takes the remaining members of his group back to town and returns to Pueblo Grande to search for the missing scientist. Morningstar’s search hits a snag when lawyer Slade Salters and some white renegades set out to take the Chinese’s carefully guarded secret – gold – for themselves. They view Jim as an obstacle to their success and kidnap the woman who had promised to help him find his missing scientist. Caught between two determined forces, Morningstar endeavors to rescue both missing people, save the lives of those who accompany him, and bring peace back to Peaceful Valley.
Gunfight on Europa Station by David Boop
An actual wagon train to space?
Gunslinging cowpokes riding in rickety rocket ships?
What isn’t possible when you mix science fiction and Westerns?
The final frontier ain’t so final in these 12 tales of space exploration and each a timeless yarn told around the warm glow of a nuclear reactor just before it goes supernova. There’s a story for everyone who’s ever dreamed of traveling the stars.
From the lone stranger who flies into town to help a widow and her daughter to the alien rancher trying to pose as human, they are familiar, yet with completely new twists. Take the pair of mercenaries who sign on to stop a mining camp insurrection only to discover they might be on the wrong side of evolution, or the prospector who finds the strike of a lifetime but ends up stranded on a barren moon without hope of rescue.
Assembled inside are the biggest names in science fiction, including, Elizabeth Moon, Alan Dean Foster, Jane Lindskold, and Wil McCarthy are some of the exciting yarn-spinners inside.
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Michael Punke’s The Revenant tells a story of nearly unimaginable human endurance over 3,000 miles of uncharted American wilderness, spanning what is today the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Based on the real life of fur trapper Hugh Glass, The Revenant recounts the toll of envy and betrayal, and the power of obsession and vengeance. Punke’s novel opens in 1823, when thirty-six-year-old Hugh Glass joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. on a venture into perilous, unexplored territory. After being savagely mauled by a grizzly bear, his nearly lifeless body is left in the care of two volunteers from the company—John Fitzgerald, a ruthless mercenary, and young Jim Bridger, the future “King of the Mountain Men.” When Indians approach their camp, Fitzgerald and Bridger abandon Glass. Worse yet, they rob the wounded man of his weapons and tools—the very things that might have given him a chance on his own. Deserted, defenseless, and furious, Glass vows his survival. And his revenge.
Shelf Analysis 