We’re thrilled to welcome E.S. Raye for a guest takeover! His debut novel, Gas Giant Gambit: A Tall Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift, released just yesterday, and we couldn’t be more excited. In this piece, he shares how mashing up genres—science fiction and Western—lets him breathe new life into familiar tropes.
Hi! I’m E.S. Raye, and my debut novel, Gas Giant Gambit: A Tall Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift, came out on September 16th, 2025. Kirkus Reviews called it “An imaginative, genre-bending gunslinger tale with a compelling queer protagonist.”
And today, with release day coming up quickly, I want to talk about genre.
Whether it’s music, movies, video games, or books, genre is pretty important. Publishers like to put stories in neat columns, and as an audience, we appreciate the categorization so we can know–more or less–what we’re getting into before we begin. In bookstores and online, we rely on that little genre label to sort books into useful groups.
But more than simply labeling a story, genres offer some level of expectations; each genre has its own beats, themes, and tropes. Readers look for these signposts along the way. They’re comforting, familiar, and reassure us we’re going where we want to be.
But sometimes, tropes get stale, or worse, become cliché.
As an author, reader, gamer, and member of the audience, my favorite way to breathe new life into old tropes is with a well-executed mashup.
My Mashup: Gas Giant Gambit
A Lifetime of Love
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction. I’ve been watching Star Trek and Star Wars for as long as I can remember, and my bookshelf is overflowing with entries from the genre, featuring authors both classic and modern. Westerns, on the other hand, have never really been one of my favorites. Despite that, I’ve always felt a connection to the genre through my maternal grandfather. When I was very little, I stayed with my grandparents during the day when my parents were at work. When I look back on those days, it feels like there was almost always a Western on the TV. I watched things like Shane, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West from that couch beside my grandfather in his recliner.
As I grew older, I discovered the Western influence on characters I already loved, like Han Solo and Boba Fett. Not to mention Star Trek’s “Wagon Train to the Stars” inception. Into the 1990s, my horizons expanded with animes in the genre, like Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, and later still, the overtly gunslinging sci-fi, Firefly.
When the idea for Gas Giant Gambit first came to me, the space-western genre was experiencing a bit of a resurgence thanks to the popularity of The Mandalorian, and I was struck by not only how popular the mashup elements were with audiences, but how underserved the genre was in written fiction.
I knew then that Gas Giant Gambit had to be that collision of science fiction and cowboy called “space-western.”
Why a Space-Western?
At first glance, science fiction and Westerns may seem like they're at opposite ends of the genre spectrum. One is historical, the other, speculative. One looks back at the successes and failures of the past; the other looks to the possibilities of the future.
But look a little deeper, and you’ll find these genres are actually far closer together than you might have expected.
Both offer themes of isolation and pushing the frontier.
Both can explore questions of colonization and who gets what rights.
Both discuss cultural tipping points, and how best to move on from them.
Both are often windows–or even mirrors–into contemporary times and modern society.
These similarities and dichotomies have always appealed to me, and made for the perfect playground for the sort of story I wanted to tell.
What Makes a Space-Western?
The genre is broad, with some titles emphasising the science fiction aspects, and others the Western tropes. But most stories in this sub-genre share a few characteristics.
Perhaps the most common is the idea that the vast distances between stars creates certain barriers and hardships similar to those faced by American settlers as they moved west in the 1800s. These obstacles change people, as they did back then, forcing folks to become independent, insular, mistrustful, and often violent. Those on the frontier–far from the gleaming light of “civilization”–are left to the whims of whatever authority (if any) that has claim over the area. The world is often gritty, with rampant poverty and steep power imbalances.
The perfect place to explore themes of corruption and control.
Gas Giant Gambit
Gas Giant Gambit makes use of all these tools.
Faster-than-light travel is possible and common, but it’s still relatively slow when compared to the distances between stars. Furthermore, faster-than-light communication is not possible, and messages can travel only as fast as the vessel carrying them.
Where most sci-fi uses the ocean as its preferred metaphor when it comes to space travel, I instead envisioned those barren light-years as the prairies and deserts of the American southwest. As such, for Gus and her trusty steed Tilly to travel from Earth and the “Old Colonies” to the story’s main setting of Las Rafagas, it takes roughly the same time it would have taken a person to travel from the east coast to the southwest on horseback.
Gas Giant Gambit drinks deep from the well of Western tropes. There’s an old, tired marshal, a corrupt landowner, ranchers and miners in need of help, an exploited native population, outlaws, quick draw gunfights, gambling, and a protagonist with no name who blows into town. Some tropes are played straight, others are mercilessly subverted.
But fear not, sci-fi fans, because those tropes are aplenty, too! Technology plays a central role in the conflict, one of the primary characters is a robot farmhand, there’s a rancher with a bionic leg, and even a semi-sentient spaceship that behaves like a loyal and trustworthy horse.
And, like both genres when they are at their best, Gas Giant Gambit features a diverse cast of characters with their own motivations and desires, heaps of social commentary, and a badass antihero unwillingly launched on a journey of self-discovery and change.
Gas Giant Gambit is the story I didn’t know I needed to tell until it was told. And it couldn’t be told in any other way than by smashing two great genres together, and assembling a narrative from the puzzle pieces.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Gas Giant Gambit: A Tall Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift released on September 16th, 2025. It’s available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from Alex Parker Publishing.