Review by J. Comer
In 1872, author Ned Buntline teamed up with William “Buffalo Bill” Cody to produce The Scouts of the Prairie, a stage show based on Buntline’s novels. Cody wove Buntline’s fiction and his own life into the myth of the cowboy. Although the “wild west” of the Buffalo Bill shows was never real, the cowboy image has become central to American culture, and Science Fiction has reflected this with the emergence of the Space Western. Themes of settlers taming a wilderness abound in Heinlein; Andre Norton’s Beast Master had a Native American hero, as did the 1980s cartoon BraveStarr. And Firefly redefined a Space Western for the 21st century.
The authors & stories include:
Milton Davis, author of the RPG Ki-Khanga, pens “Justice and Prosperity,” a tale of murder and revenge; the degree to which the robot avenger is a commentary on slavery, a la “Fondly Farenheit,” isn’t clear.
Next comes “Five Mules For Madame Calypso,” in which a brothel is targeted by a trickster…who becomes the tricked.
“Past Sins,” by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, is a tale of military deserters on a frontier planet.
And in “The Last Round,” by Susan R. Matthews, a Western duel happens on a monocrop-economy world.
The anthology’s title tale refers to a real place: Proxima Centauri’s planet[1], on which “High Noon” is a place, not a time; cyborgs and smart guns coexist with shantytowns and reptilian horses.
Peter Wacks’s “Black Box” is a somewhat confusing story set on a blasted world.
Brenda Cooper, the coauthor of Building Harlequin’s Moon and “Ice and Mirrors” with Larry Niven, contributes “The Planet and the Pig,” which sees a family team of poachers land on an off-limits world…with dark secrets, including that of how it’s cared for.
Ken Scholes’s “Harley Takes a Wife,” by the author of the Psalms of Isaak series, is a funny homage to the John Wayne classics.
“Warlock Rules” by Hank Schwaeble takes the Western gunslinger duel motif to extremes, as gunslingers duel aliens.
Finally, Walter Jon Williams, author of Aristoi and Metropolitan, adds the provocatively titled “West World.” This story has a Western movie being made in space a la The Technicolor Time Machine. Williams’s eye for detail makes this one of the best stories.
The collection as a whole, like the West itself, is uneven. This West, like the Wild West of film and TV, is a fictional place, and that enables authors, steered by the editor’s love of hard SF, to trek different trails as they go. The Wacks and Ward/Dilmore stories took the theme more literally, while the Scholes and Williams stories were more entertaining.
All in all, this reviewer enjoyed the book; the variety of work here will appeal to hard-SF and space-opera types as well. Again, the book is uneven, and some of the stories feel as though they don’t really all belong in the same antho; others pretty clearly weren’t written for this book, but that’s not a serious problem. Recommended.
[1] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/7167/proxima-centauri-b/
Cirsova 