Review: The Buntline Special by Mike Resnick
Positives
Negatives
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Welcome to a West like you’ve never seen before, where electric lights shine down on the streets of Tombstone, while horseless stagecoaches carry passengers to and fro, and where death is no obstacle to The Thing That Was Once Johnny Ringo. Think you know the story of the O.K. Corral? Think again, as five-time Hugo winner Mike Resnick takes on his first steampunk western tale, and the West will never be the same.
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In Mike Resnick’s novel The Buntline Special, life in the old west town of Tombstone gets steampunked.
Urban Dictionary defines “steampunk” as: a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in antiquarian Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternative history setting. It could be described by the slogan “What the past would look like if the future had happened sooner.” It includes fiction with science fiction, fantasy or horror themes.
The term “steampunk” was first coined in 1987 and so has been around for a couple of decades, but is a relatively new subgenre to me. The Old West, however, I have loved since I was a youngun watching Gunsmoke reruns. So I thought SWEET! THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME! But it was moderately bleh.
Over the years there have been many retellings of the Earp brothers, Doc Holiday, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, and life in and around Tombstone. The author has used much of this pre-established and common knowledge to jump directly into these well-known characters and settings. Really, why spend pages reinventing what has already been imagined? Resnick, however, is adding (or attempting to add) another Dime Novel cover to the infamous Tombstone showdown with the introduction of Thomas Edison and Ned Buntline: inventors of electric street lamps, electric stage coaches, impenetrable brass robotic prosthetics, and entirely robotic women working in the local whore house.
Steampunk done well is a seamless fusion of antiquity and innovation, but in this case it was quite forced. While suspending disbelief is a part of loving science fiction, there is no structured or organized science behind these inventions in Mike Resnick’s story…like a force field that can sense who is a friend and is foe: that’s not steam, that’s magic. Throw in a few Native American medicine men casting curses, a were-vampire Bat Masterson, a zombie Johnnie Ringo, and shape-shifting Apache braves, and the story gets quite muddy.
After a lot of drinking, eating, gambling, more drinking, bickering, and technobabble, there really wasn’t a whole lot of POW in The Buntline Special, which is what is really wanted from a steampunk Western.
