Many countries have a period of time where they are composed mostly of fuedal states loosely ruled by some central authority and seperated by untamed country.  These time periods seem to be a spawning ground for deeply captivating mythos which can trancend culture in their appeal.  Fuedal Europe gave us the Authurian legends.  Fuedal Japan gave us fantastic tales of wandering Samari.  Ancient China spawned similar myths about the Kung Fu masters.  And for America, the time of the frontier gave us the tall tales of larger-than-life men capable of unthinkable feats.  It also gave us the stories of the maverick gun-hand.
            The America of the pioneers is still fairly recent history, and this has affected the tone of the stories it created.  Thousands of years ago when the stories of Author were forged, the prevailing notion of the universe was that of superstition.  For this reason, the stories of the ancient knights contain dragons and giants while the stories of the samari have demons and trolls. 
            By the time of the gunslinger, modernism was well in swing and science was the prevailing notion of the day.  Sure, there were plenty of religious and superstitious folk, but by then the mindset of the world was changed, and these notions of the supernatural did not work their way into the legends, or even most of the tall-tales. 
            It was these very supernatural elements of ancient legend that allowed for the dawn of what we now commonly call “Fantasy” in literature. 
            Most notably the work of Tolkien, wherein he took the ancient legends of knights and dragons and turned it into something the world had never seen before.  An epic tale with deep, human characters, songs, tales, and folk-legends all its own, and functioning according to rules and sciences not of this world, but defined and meticulous nonetheless.
            But the Western world was not entirely devoid of myth and mystery.  Watch any western you choose, and you will feel it lurking beneath the surface.  A taste of the supernatural, a hint of horror, a feel that there is something more going on than all that you see.
           
            The western as we know it was forged in a farely narrow window between the end of the Civil War and the invention of the automobile.  Roughly fifty years.  These were the last days of the power of the Native American people.  They were the true holders of folklore, legend, and mystery in the western world.  In many ways they always will be.  Unfortunately for western folklore, the white man didn’t believe what they had to say.
           
            When I set out to write the West Wheel series, it was my intention to do with the western what Tolkien had done to the medieval legend: completely transform it.  Before you judge me too harshly for taking the route every ametuer author ever has in trying to mimic Tolkien, please understand, I have no delusions that I have the narrative voice he did, that I would be able to accomplish what he did, and I certainly had no intention of copying his work with a Western theme.  I simply have no other way to describe what I am doing.
            To create a western fantasy at an epic scale, I really only had one of two choices.  The history of the wild west is not so far obscured in the mists of time that I could easily get away with writing whatever I wanted. So I could either write an alternate history, taking the facts and changing them as I needed, or I could create my own world that operated according to its own rules and had its own history.  I hope I made the right choice.

This way to the West Wheel Carols.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Eightballs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.