I still find it strange how a man can lose at a war and then enlist in another with his enemy. But there are no real sides in this life except the barrel of a gun and the butt of a gun, and I know where I prefer to stand.
I was a little hesitant when offered a chance to read Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West (set to be released on May 13; still time to pre-order!). Sure, John Joseph Adams can do no wrong as far as short-story anthologies can go; he has a knack for finding some of the best short-story writers out there, and I’ve found something to enjoy in every one of his collections. But Westerns? Those usually aren’t my thing. Fortunately Adams’s introduction to the book caught my interest right away, and all he had to do was use the phrase “..it’s true that steampunk and weird westerns are similar in a lot of ways.” Both can be Victorian era stories, but Weird Westerns, he explains, are exclusively set in the American West. So geography-wise they have a much narrower focus than Steampunk. In everything else, though, they cover a lot more ground.
The twenty-three stories in this collection include many steampunk favorites, like clockwork automatons, weaponized leather gauntlets, dirigibles, and steam-powered anything. But there are also zombies, aliens, monsters, historical figures, supernatural playing cards, pacts with the Devil, and magic-using Native Americans who are getting reeeeal tired of the government changing their mind about how much land they’re allowed to keep.
Most of the stories capitalize on the lawlessness of frontier life. It’s easier to have an adventure when robbery and gambling are considered perfectly acceptable ways to make a living. And while there are always heroic sherifs and deputies trying to keep their small towns safe, “justice” is usually something bought from random bounty hunters. Add to that a mix of clockwork gunslingers and Civil War veterans-turned Indian hunters and you’ve got the potential for a lot of fireworks. Don’t expect any stories where the bad guy serves out his prison term and decides to live a clean life. Most of the time, the characters are lucky if they live to the end of the story.
One of the things I was surprised to find I liked about each of the stories was the tone and the dialect of the characters. The narrator for David Farland’s “Hellfire on the High Frontier” and the one from Elizabeth Bear’s “Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle” especially had an appealing, folksy way of speaking. The way characters would talk in just about all of the stories was drawling sometimes, but with a little bite of humor and toughness. At times it reminded me of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which just added to the appeal. (Adams referred to that as “Joss Whedon’s beloved, cancelled-too-soon TV show Firefly” in the introduction. Points to you, Adams!)
Probably my favorite stories were either the creepier ones, or the all-out madcap adventures. “Wrecking Party” by Alastair Reynolds features a hidden conspiracy of machines, both the ones that want to exploit a “primitive” earth, and the ones working to stop them from hurting our poor, harmless, soon-to-be extinct society. There’s a scene where an automaton removes its face, and the result isn’t what you’d expect. VERY Lovecraftian imagery there. And Tad Williams’s “Strong Medicine” is about a time-traveling town. Not just the town’s citizens, mind you, the entire town travels to a random point every year, and every thirty-nine years it travels way too far.
On a much lighter note, “The Golden Age” by Walter Jon Williams is a comic-book-type story of costumed heroes and villains of the Old West. Williams is very aware of the silliness of it all; the main character is a miner who becomes the criminal mastermind “The Commodore”, and spends a lot of the time wondering how the hell things got to this point.
And then there’s Fred Van Lente‘s “Neversleeps”, definitely the most steampunk of the weird western tales. It’s set in an alternate history where magic has been embraced by the United States to counteract the Native American shamans who tried to defeat the government and take back their land. By the time the story starts, things have progressed to the point that magic is the dominant force, technology is outlawed, the Pinkertons enforce the status quo, and the forces of science are in the middle of an ideological war between the supporters of Edison and the supporters of the martyred Tesla. It’s a fun, smart story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is definitely a plus in something that includes lightning guns, and flying trains being pulled by dragons.
What really stands out about this collection is the sense that each of these could have easily been expanded into a much larger story. In a few cases that wasn’t always a good thing: Alan Dean Foster’s “Holy Jingle”, Joe R. Lansdale‘s “The Red-Headed Dead”, and Seanan McGuire‘s “Stingers and Strangers” feature characters from other stories by the authors, and I was left with the feeling that I was missing a lot by not having read the previous works. And Rajan Khanna built up this amazing concept for “Second Hand”: traveling gamblers who each had a deck of magical cards that could do miracles if you used a suit and number appropriate to the situation, and each of which could only be used once. But it all felt like a world-building exercise, with the actual story still to come.
But for the most part these weren’t quick stories tossed off by the authors; they each had huge, just barely explored worlds. Even Christie Yant‘s entry “Dead Man’s Hand”, the smallest story in the book, just barely scratched the surface of the idea that life is as random as the shuffle of the cards, and that somewhere in the universe there are alternate histories with a different fate for Wild Bill Hickok with every different hand that could have been dealt. These were short stories, but none of them were small.