Gunslingin' Queen of the Dystopian Frontier

Lyndsay Ely, Gunslinger Girl: A Novel

Serendipity “Pity” Jones has nothing to live for on the Commune. Days are filled with work and patriotism, then she comes home at night to an all-male family that despises her. Rather than face encroaching adulthood on those terms, she and her best friend pull a runner into the technological wasteland of the new American West. But she quickly discovers that, on the outside, a woman’s value matters only by her product in the moment.

Debut author Lindsay Ely combines Pat Frank’s apocalyptic classic Alas, Babylon with Owen Wister’s The Virginian for a product readers will find familiar, if they’ve ever watched Firefly. This is both good and bad. Over the last two decades, frontier sci-fi has become so commonplace, readers can slip into this book like a favorite pair of jammies. It requires little effort to immerse oneself in Ely’s world. But like those jammies, the comfort may be sleep-inducing.

The Second Civil War left the American East controlled by the Confederation of North America. CONA believes in hard work, stability, and order, so it built the Communes. But wartime bioterror left a paucity of fertile women, and Pity’s father sees dollar signs in her uterus. Pity wants more from life. Her late mother, a former Patriot (think “Browncoat”), taught her marksmanship, so she steals Mommy’s guns and heads for the frontier seeking her fortune.

Out there, she quickly loses everything: scroungers loot her goods, murder her friend, and torch her truck. Left with only her guns, Pity falls in with mysterious strangers from Cessation, the last free outpost in America. With nowhere left to go, she follows their lead. Her impeccable aim and recognized beauty make her a desirable commodity in Cessation, where she becomes a star of the Theatre, half Annie Oakley, half circus freak.

Lyndsay Ely

Ely’s futuristic setting has high-tech gewgaws, but they aren’t much expounded upon. Audiences will recognize her world from Tatooine, the Eavesdown Docks, or Deep Space Nine: it’s Dodge City with shinier chrome. Cessation’s street violence (which is mostly just mentioned; Pity doesn’t much go outdoors) contrasts with the glamorous but morally odious order enforced by Casimir, the casino/whorehouse/sideshow that rules town. Some science fiction happens, but at heart, this story is a western.

Frontier myth looms large in American science fiction. Han Solo can get goods into the home territories without Imperial entanglements; Commander Adama plots a course “beyond the red line.” Americans see space as territory ripe for conquest, and even NASA press releases are often redolent of Manifest Destiny. Even YA dystopias from major publishing conglomerates pit suffocating civilization against the pioneering spirit. We’ll all become free, if we leave home, and become willing to kill.

This trend has problems, certainly. HBO’s Westworld used Indians as set dressing; not one Native American character had lines. We see something similar here: the boundary between CONA and Cessation is populated by Dissidents and Scroungers, landless and chased pillar to post by CONA military and paid mercenaries. But like Indians, other characters mostly speak for these oppressed groups; they seldom speak for themselves. Even when it’s their own story they need to tell.

Readers could make a drinking game of recognizing the prior stories which influence Ely’s narrative. Though I’ve mentioned mass-media science fiction franchises, the two stories I see harvested most liberally are Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead. Both novels, considered classics, feature Easterners needing to quickly unlearn civilized ways to survive beyond the frontier line. That theme, of counter-conformity and bare-knuckle survival, resonates strongly in Ely’s novel.

Ely presents us, essentially, a story of subjugation. Pity could accept her father’s iron-fisted dominion, but she requires autonomy CONA’s patriarchal structure won’t allow. So she flees, only to find the frontier has its own requirements. Cessation offers decadent luxuries (in both the popular and Marxist senses), but Pity quickly learns that, to embrace these luxuries, she must—well, spoilers. Let’s say, whether it’s the comforts of civilization, frontier lawlessness, or whatever, she must conform.

Rereading what I’ve just written, I realize it could sound like I hated this book. Not so. I devoured it in one frenetic weekend, and I can offer the best compliment available from a blue-collar worker: it kept me up past my bedtime. It’s a good story, well-written, with engaging characters and humane plot. Just don’t expect it to change your life, or upend your genre expectations. Take it for a fun story, and it won’t disappoint.