Science Fiction Western

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast - stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border - has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline.

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.

The world is on the brink of war. Fisk and Shoe - mercenaries, not wanting to get caught in the middle of a political whirlwind - must deliver a very important message and find a very dangerous man. They have caught the eye of the powerful men of the world, and now the stakes are higher than they like. And the Emperor has decreed that Livia Cornelius, pregnant with Fisk's child, must travel to the far lands of the Autumn Lords on a diplomatic mission. It will mean crossing half the world and facing new dangers.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

The world is ending...or so it seems for junior tennis champion Ele O’Neill. How can she face life in a Montana ghost town after Seattle? No tennis courts, no friends, and she’s stuck in a falling-down old theatre with a rotten little brother and parents who are acting like aliens. And something’s hiding in Ele’s room, watching her every move, but no one will listen to her. Steven Douglas is a 19-year-old cowboy with one little problem - he’s been dead for over 150 years. He’s supposed to protect the weird O’Neill family from unimaginable evil lurking in the theatre....

Jessica Mayfield is presented with that very dilemma when conducting research to add a new adventure for her day trip business lands her squarely in 1890 Arizona. She lost her husband in the war overseas and proceeded to pour herself into building her day tour company with no interest in finding love again. She never expected to find herself staring into the sky blue eyes of a real live cowboy.

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.

She needs a fresh start. Out of options, the curvy woman applies to an interstellar mail-order bride agency. She’s sent to a rough planet on the edge of the galaxy knowing very little about the mysterious, horned alien warrior to whom she’s promised. Quickly she discovers the marriage contract is not to one but two dominating, muscular warriors. Even more surprising is the undeniable pull she feels toward her “husbands.”

There are cowboy boots on his feet, pop-up hints appearing in his vision, and, oh yeah, there’s a mariachi band in his head. The world's not going to slow down and let him catch up though, no, it's going to throw a chrome hover car at him and hope he gets the picture.

Life is hard for Sharkey and the other scrappers in Lawrence. After the Great Oil Crisis the Earth became a hot, wild, dangerous place. Those that could reach the portals left the planet long ago. Those left behind live a desperate and brutal existence, surviving on the bones of a ruined civilization, fighting and killing each other in a world taken back by the earth. But Sharkey has hope.

Colt Hawkridge is an indentured servant living the life of a drake wrangler at Drake Iron Ranch on the farthest edge of civilization. It’s a good life, but it’s not his own. More than anything Colt craves his freedom. And now he just might have it...if he can survive. A runaway drake leads him to discovering dangers and opportunities lurking under the mountains he’s named for. The goblin plague has outrun the advance of civilization and a horde is gathering with the intent to attack the settlements.

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.