Frontier Earth: Book Review

It’s 1881 and a man wakes up in the desert. He has lost his memory and is being chased by alien monsters bent on world conquest. He stumbles into Tombstone, Arizona and becomes involved in the events leading up to the famous gunfight behind the O.K. Corral.

If you think this sounds a bit like “Cowboys and. Aliens” you would not be alone. But I think the 2011 movie and the 2006 graphic novel it was based on is not pulling anything from this 1999 novel, merely playing on common tropes. And I would expect a book proposal by Bruce Boxleitner to play on common tropes. You see, even though this novel has Boxleitner’s name on the front and his smiling face dominating the back cover, this book was ghost written by William H. Keith.

At least, that’s what it says on Bill Keith’s website and what he told me when I spoke with him at a convention a number of years back. He was cagey about just how much Boxleitner had to do the writing but, by comparison, he was very open about how much Peter Jurasik had worked with him on the novel “Diplomatic Act” (1998) for which Jurasik and Keith shared authorship on the cover.

You can draw your own conclusions but I’m going to go on with the assumption that Boxleitner pitched the “Predators at the O.K. Corral” story and Keith took it from there.

And I clearly see Keith’s hand in the details of the alien aliens. They are not portrayed as merely humans in alien literary costumes. He goes to great lengths to detail how the Kra’agh think differently, although I think he falls into the now overused process of creating alien names and languages with a lot of apostrophes. Minor nit picked.

The Cowboys are presented as villainous and the Earps and Doc Holiday only slightly less villainous, as is historically accurate. This moral ambiguity serves to contrast the main story of the protagonists which is more clearly good and bad, with the hunter aliens bent on world conquest and the protagonists opposing them.

“The Buntline Special” by Mike Resnick takes the O.K. Corral story and twists it with vampires and the undead. Definitely steampunk. Mark Hodder’s “Spring Heeled Jack” ads a time traveling twist to the life of Sir Richard Francis Burton. Very much alternative history. I would be hesitant to call “Frontier Earth” steampunk or even alternative history. The same people die, the same people live. The events leading up to the gun battle and the shootout itself are described in excruciating detail and, ultimately, add absolutely nothing to the story. The protagonists flit in and out of the events and the feud serves only as a backdrop, told in such detail that you keep watching to the moment when everything changes. When history turns over and we step fully into a fantasy world where this interstellar cat and mouse game changes the course of history as we know it.

It never does, and it becomes more of a distraction than anything else.

I think that if Keith didn’t have to spend so much time on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and all its accompanying backstory that he could have made a much better narrative. The sequel, “Searcher” seems to dispense with that baggage and may be a better read. As for “Frontier Earth”, it is an OK story but nothing that really grabs my attention.

If I wanted a history lesson, I’d pick up “The Last Gunfight” by Jeff Guinn. If I want it mixed up in my science fiction, I want more fiction.