In the Post

So today I find my prose in the Huffington Post.  Not a political article, but a brief appreciation of a long-defunct TV show.

Why?  It’s all in aid of promoting Dead Man’s Hand, the Weird West anthology edited by John Joseph Adams.  You’ll find a story of mine in there, but that’s not what I’m writing about.  I’m writing about The Wild Wild West, the Sixties spy/western mashup that ended up— inadvertently, I imagine— inventing steampunk.  (I really can’t think of any precursor that’s older.)

While the idea of mashing up Westerns and spy shows— both TV standards at the time— was probably sensible enough, the problem was that the United States really didn’t have any enemies during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant.  The Civil War was over, no other governments wanted to invade, and we didn’t have any secrets worth stealing.  Sure, there were bandits, but you didn’t need gadget-laden superspies to defeat them, you just needed some guys with badges and guns.

So what the series gave us was supervillains, mad scientists, and insane post-Vernian technology.  The most unforgettable of the villains was of course Dr. Miguelito Loveless, played with manic verve by the 3′ 10″ Michael Dunn— who up to that point in his career had been a cabaret singer, believe it or not.

The series also gave us a lot of villains who wanted to kill, depose, or kidnap President Grant. (I don’t know why, but movie and TV villains are always after Ulysses Grant.  Nobody ever takes a potshot at William Howard Taft.)

I suspect that The Wild Wild West is better in memory than it was on the screen, so I probably won’t be tuning in to a rerun anytime soon.  But still, it should have an honored place in the history of steampunk, as the series that started it all.

And incidentally, this is the second anthology titled Dead Man’s Hand with a story of mine.  The first was a Wild Cards anthology, Volume VII I believe . . .