A science fiction Western is a work of fiction which has elements of science fiction in a Western setting. It is the inverse of the Space Western, which is set in outer space and contains Western themes.
A science fiction Western occurs in the past, or in a world resembling the past, in which modern or future technology exists. The anachronistic technology of these stories is present because scientific paradigms occurred earlier in history but are implemented via industrial elements present at that time, or because technology is brought from another time or place. The genre often overlaps with Steampunk.
Read more about Science Fiction Western: Examples
Famous quotes containing the words science, fiction and/or western:
“You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“trying to live in the terrible western world
here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious,”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)