WESTERN HUMOR CHALLENGE - January 09

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Festus

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A western theme isn't unknown in Sci/Fi, Louis L'Amour's "Haunted Mesa" Alan Dean Foster's "Mad Amos" and H. Beam Piper's "Lone Star Planet" are just a few examples, and the later two stories had some good laughs in them.

That's what we're after in this challenge, some humor that will make our boots fly off and hit the wall! The sky is the limit as long as it's western related, so you can have fantasy, sci-fi, etc in your stories.

This here forum is blessed with many superior writers, I sneak in here quite often to read your works! We'd really appreciate you all trying your hand at this! :)
 

dclary

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Sci Fi Western Humor?

Blazing Space Balls?
 

Ruv Draba

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You'd have to add Joss Whedon's Firefly series high on the list of SFF-meets-Western, along with Westworld -- a B-grade movie in which robot gunslingers let tourists have shoot-outs. Many long-running 'SF travel' series will have an episode where the main characters would visit a western-like location (I recall that even the old Battlestar Galactica series couldn't avoid this temptation). Robot sheriffs and lightning-quick mechanical black-hats seem to be very popular in such episodes. Space-operas sometimes feature Western-influenced characters too -- it would be easy to put Han Solo in a Stetson, for instance. And what is Battle beyond the Stars but The Magnificent Seven recast in space? (Which was itself a knockoff of Kurasawa's The Seven Samurai...)

Then there's the Western/horror stories which seem to be a sub-genre in themselves: it's every bit as attractive to pit gunslingers against zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghosts as it is to do it with pirates.

Western fiction actually has a lot in common with SF: both are often set on frontiers, with ultracompetent rugged individualists carving out civilisation, justice and social order. It has a great deal in common with fantasy as well -- heroic figures fighting evil, making good and winning love.

Of course, it's easy to find parodic humour here just by upending these tropes, or situational humour based on the discomfiture of heroes. And Westerns are never short of sarcasm, invective, irony and laconic wit.

This could be a lot of fun...
 
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Fenika

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Aw, my cowboy SF is going out this month :(
 
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