Science Fiction Western

If we transport livestock over the roads today, could it be possible that aliens did too when we humans were in our Wild West period of development? What if it were true, and one alien cargo ship broke down around Earth, suffered a malfunction, and a weird animal creature catapulted to Earth in a broken containment cell? Now imagine it was found by the most contradictory of outlaws in the West, with a shady past and a wicked sense of personality yearning for redemption. Now pretend the aliens are forbidden to enter Earth, to retrieve the animal, because of a law in the galaxy.

The colonists of the planet Montana are accustomed to being ignored. Situated in the buffer zone between two rival human empires, their world is a backwater: remote, provincial, independently minded. Even as a provisional member of the Republic of Aligned Worlds, Montana merits little consideration - until it becomes the flashpoint in an impending interstellar war. When pirate raids threaten to destabilize the region, the RAW deploys its mechanized armored infantry to deal with the situation.

Owl Dance is a weird Western steampunk novel. The year is 1876. Sheriff Ramon Morales of Socorro, New Mexico, meets a beguiling woman named Fatemeh Karimi, who is looking to make a new start after escaping the oppression of her homeland. When an ancient life form called Legion comes to Earth, they are pulled into a series of events that will change the history of the world as we know it.

Legendary writer Zane Grey earned legions of devoted fans with his gritty westerns. In To the Last Man, he dramatizes the events of the Pleasant Valley War of Arizona, a bloody feud that nearly wiped two families off the face of the Earth. Jean Isbel has settled in Oregon and is growing comfortable with his new home when an urgent letter arrives from his father. Trouble is brewing in Arizona between the Isbel cattlemen and the Jorth clan of sheepmen. Rushing to his father’s side, Jean arrives just before the first bullets start flying. But matters are complicated when Jean and Ellen Jorth, daughter of the sheepmen’s leader, fall in love.

In Aurora Crossing by best-selling author Karl H. Schlesier, a young man - an outsider by upbringing and ancestry - becomes embroiled in the Nez Perces War of 1877. His quest to find identity and belonging in the clash of cultures takes him on the historic 1,200-mile Nez Perces trek from Idaho toward refuge in Canada.

Guns of the Waste Land recasts the legends of King Arthur as an American Western. Set in the late 19th century outside the West Texas town of Bretton, the second volume continues the story of four men devoted in their own ways to Sheriff Ardiss Drake. Percy Murratt awakens to find himself safely in Bretton under Drake's protection and able to learn of his absentee father. Meanwhile, Reverend Merle Tallison struggles to find God in the midst a world seemingly devoid of decency and goodwill.

Set in the late 19th century outside the West Texas town of Bretton, this first volume tells the story of four men wandering the American desert: Percy Murratt leaves his home to find Sheriff Ardiss Drake and learn more about the kind of man his father was.

Now an agent for the small, covert SIFTR Agency, Rob Chandler is confronted with the possibility something terrible has occurred to a beloved fellow agent. He knows who is responsible, the WWZ, a fanatical neo-Nazi organization and another, even more powerful organization, called the Order. Together they are making their move - one that could alter the geopolitical landscape of the United States, forever. The newly selected multi-billionaire leader of the Order, Rudy Palmolive, has a unique hobby...he's built an 1881 re-creation of the town of Tombstone. It's a testing ground....

The apocalypse happened, but no one knows how. All that’s left are a smattering of bizarro cities called remnants, each ruled by a grotesque potentate known as an Odd. If you wind up in hock to the Odds, they ship you to a chain-gang that stretches thousands of miles across desert, steppe, and tundra. A good-hearted drifter named Eldridge is a longtime member of the Chain.

Reginald Worthington is a vindictive man. He blames US Marshal Mason Sadler for the death of his only child, the former Mrs. Sadler. Now Worthington wants revenge. Enlisting the services of a highly skilled team of cutthroats, he dispatches them to Tombstone with orders to kill Sadler and anyone he cares about, especially Belle Dubois, the Bird Cage Theater Madame and the love of his life who just happens to be the new Mrs. Sadler. Not leaving the Marshal's demise to chance, Worthington also engages the talents of the Professor and his latest invention.

US Marshal James Creed has known loss, starting from the untimely death of his wife and daughter in a sudden fire. His work, chasing down and arresting outlaws across the Wild West, is all he has left to live for. Then one day, in 1876, the infamous killer Corwin Blake catches Creed by surprise and guns him down. Creed awakes after a mysterious young woman resurrects him in a basement laboratory beneath a brothel. Half alive, Creed feels torn between his need for justice and his desire to fall back into the peace of death. Creed's instincts drive him to protect the city of Santa Cruz, California, from the outlaws it harbors while searching for Blake.

In the years after the American Civil War, the West is wild, and the East is run by the robber barons battling each other for power and money. The range is untamed and blood-soaked, and the cities are dazzling tributes to culture and questionable scientific development. Outlaws roam free on the frontiers, and crooked lawmen and Pinkertons compete with lawless bounty hunters for the prices on their heads. Tess Mercury and her posse are the best damn bounty hunters in the West.

Once he was a young, happily married businessman. Then he lost his wife to human madness and that young man was gone, replaced by the Loner, the wandering son of legendary gunfighter Frank Morgan, and now the current occupant of a cell in the brutal and unforgiving Hell Gate prison. The Kid's crime? He looked too much like an outlaw who escaped from this very prison. So the Kid teams up with a fellow inmate with an escape plan, vowing to hunt down a look-alike killer on the loose.

Once the world was beautiful and full of people. Cities filled the landscape and buildings reached the sky. But now, after The Wandering, very few portions of the old world remain, and more of the surviving fragments of a glorious past disappear every day.

US Marshal Mason Sadler has a great hustle going on with the vivacious and lovely Belle Dubois, the madam of the Bird Cage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. She keeps the outlaws occupied until he conveniently shows up to arrest them after which she and Mason split the reward.

Zane Grey's tale shines like the gold in this story. He deftly combines the contemporary history of the border uprising between the United States and Mexico with a fast-moving adventure tale. The prologue describes the finding of gold and the sad plight of the prospectors who discovered it. They will the treasure to the story's heroine. Dick Gale, an eastern college football star, and not much else, teams up with an old friend to rescue the girl and make a man of himself.

St. Louis in 1880 is full of ghosts - mangled soldiers, tortured slaves, the innocent victims of war - and Jacob Tracy can see them all. Ever since Antietam, when he lay delirious among the dead and dying, Trace has been haunted by the country's restless spirits. The curse cost him his family, his calling to the church, and damn near his sanity. He stays out of ghost-populated cities as much as possible these days, guiding wagon trains west with his pragmatic and skeptical partner, Boz.

Considered by many critics to be the very best Zane Grey Western, The U. P. Trail narrates the story of William Neale, a young engineer working for the Union Pacific railway. He must contend with Indians, bandits, badlands, and bad weather to get the train to the destination. And in the midst of all this, the love of his life is kidnapped! The railroads were expanding to link the nation, with the celebrated golden spike marking the spot in Utah where the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific would meet.

The bank is eroding. The barriers are thinning. And time is running out. The hourglass door has closed behind Dante, sending him back in time to hunt down Zo, Tony, and V. Although giving him up was the hardest test she ever faced, Abby knows that Dante is the only one who can stop the others from destroying time itself. But almost immediately, things start to change, and Abby’s worst fears are realized when Zo begins targeting her past specifically.

Written first as a series of stories in the late 19th century and published later as the quintessential Western novel in the early years of the 20th century, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister contains elements of breathtaking adventure, courage, grit, conflict, humor, and heartfelt emotions that continue to resonate in the 21st century.