Mike
Resnick’s interest in the legends of the American West has long been
evident in his novels. His
characters in Oracle, Santiago, and the Widowmaker series, among others, are clearly based
on the larger than life figures that populated the frontier and the dime
novels more than an hundred years ago.
Resnick has finally turned his attention to the real men who lived in
that world with The Buntline Special,
set in the months leading up to and following the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Not
content to let the Earps and the Clantons fight it out, Resnick introduces
several other historical figures, from Ned Buntline to Thomas Edison, to
Tombstone. Edison has been sent
to Tombstone in order to use his almost preternatural gift for invention to
turn the frontier town into a city of the future.
Buntline has arrived to make Edison’s inventions into a practical
reality for the town. The Earps are now agents to protect the two men whose
lives are important to a United States whose westward expansion has been
stopped by the Mississippi River by the spiritual forces of Indians such as
Geronimo and Hook Nose. Told mostly from the point of view of “Doc”
Holliday, the book has a clear bias and morality regarding the characters
and events.
Resnick’s
Tombstone is a steampunk frontier town, with streetlights and mechanical
whores. A series of stagecoaches, the Buntline Specials, operate without the
need of horses to draw them. For
horse rustlers, like the Clantons, the appearance of horseless carriages
threatens their illegal trade and they target Edison and Buntline, resulting
in the Earps calling for backup in the form of Holliday and Bat Masterson.
The
Buntline Special
clearly allows Resnick to have fun with his love of the Frontier and with
the current tropes of science fiction and fantasy.
In addition to the trappings of steampunk, The
Buntline Special includes zombies, robots, vampires, and guns which are
akin to lasers. Magic also works in this milieu, particularly for the native
American tribesmen who are powerful enough, whether it means keeping the
majority of White Men east of the Mississippi, or laying of curses. In the
face of the entertainment afforded by the mixing of these disparate
elements, it is, perhaps, not quite fair to take a closer look at the world
building which never quite seems to fit entirely together.
Although
Doc Holliday’s name is always linked to Wyatt Earp’s, in The Buntline Special, Holliday is given a close, if strange,
relationship with Johnny Ringo. The men’s similarities as educated men in
an uneducated world draw them together, but their abilities as gunfighters
and their positioning on opposite sides in the coming battle mean that the
two know they will eventually have to square off, and discover which of them
is a better gunslinger. Their not-quite-friendship over esoteric topics is
where The Buntline Special really
comes alive, perhaps indicative of Resnick’s own entertainment at the
pair’s friendly rivalry.
The Buntline Special is a fun trip back to a fantastic version of the
American West just as its untamed nature reaches its climax with the
Gunfight at the OK Corral. Less
concerned about examining the intricacies of either side’s claim, Resnick
takes characters whose reputations are all larger than life and manages to
magnify them further, providing the reader with an entertaining novel and a
new spin on the Old West.
