I guess, technically, no, the cardinal points don’t make sense in space. However, I’m referring to the mixing of the genres of western and outer space.

You know, like, before the moon landing in ‘69, westerns were huge. As a kid, I’d always dress up like a cowboy for Halloween, but I actually didn’t like westerns as a young man. I changed my mind about westerns in college where a professor explained to me the beauty of the western. It’s a genre where the audience already knows the setting before the movie begins. We’re in the western United States in the years just after the civil war 1870-1890. Since we all know the time and place westerns happen, story tellers can just skip the whole part of establishing the setting and just get to the story itself.

The West in the late 1800s was like no other time in history. I doubt that anything like it will happen again. It was a time of lawlessness. Or if there was a sheriff, it was like only one guy. If you’re faster on the draw than him, then it’s really no sheriff.

Westerns fell in popularity after the moon landing. The frontier is no longer the American West, it’s now outer space. So, we get stories of aliens and weird worlds and it’s labeled sci-fi, but sometimes if we’re lucky, we get a space western. It’s a western story set in space with the lawlessness of the western genre set in the new frontier of space. Wildly popular shows like Firefly or The Mandolorian are space westerns. People might think they’re watching sci-fi, but those are westerns in space.

That’s what I mean when I say space western. Sorry for the diatribe.

It all makes sense, my friend. Otherwise we could go to the extreme of Zorro or The A-Team being included due to Western elements. I mean, some Judge Dredd stories have been set on a lunar colony (I forget its name), with some quasi-Western elements, but it’s not quite a Western. So I know what you mean.

It’s a good theme.

I may have read one of those books, Slam_Bradley. I can’t swear to it, but it may have been a book called “What History Got Wrong”. One passage mentioned how there were years where Victorian Britain saw more murders than the Wild West.

This should probably, maybe be moved to another thread, but...

The issue with trying to compare per capita crime rates is that if you have one murder in a town of 1,000 people (Dodge City, Kansas in 1880) the rate per 100,000 population is through the roof compared to hundreds in New York City with a population of 2 million (1.16 million if you just consider Manhattan).  

Earp, as best I can tell, never killed anyone when he wasn't a lawman of some sort.  Now that doesn't preclude it being murder, but it was absolutely under color of law.  Did people get off on murder charges in the Old West?  Yep.  Do they today?  OJ would say no, but most of us would say yes.  Is that lawlessness?  

I'm not saying there weren't gunfights.  There were.  I'm not saying there weren't outlaws.  There were.  I'm simply saying that 150 years of mythologizing has amplified all that far out of proportion to what was actually happening at the time. 

Jonny Quest #28