Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre

Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a changeling western, what others have called weird westerns, and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as speculative westernsthat is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.

Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as western refers both to a genre and a region, Johnsons narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the speculative Wests that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Irelands Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorses Sixth World series (201819), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Véas time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West. See more