The frontier has always been about the unknown. Whether it's the desert or the stars, the spirit of exploration is the same.
People sometimes look surprised when I describe The Dust of Ages as both a Western and a science fiction novel. As if the two genres are somehow incompatible.
I've never understood that reaction. To me, they are the same genre wearing different clothes.
Both are fundamentally about the frontier — about human beings pushing into the unknown, confronting the alien and the dangerous, and being changed by the encounter. The desert and the cosmos are the same landscape at different scales. The six-gun and the plasma rifle are the same tool in different hands.
Both genres share an obsession with the lone hero: the individual who stands between civilization and chaos, who carries the weight of justice in a world where justice is fragile and contested.
Cullen 'Boone' Barrett is a Western hero. He is also a science fiction hero. He is a man who believes in a simple moral code in a universe that keeps proving how complicated morality actually is.
That tension — between the simple and the complex, between the personal and the cosmic — is what drives both genres at their best.
What makes The Dust of Ages different from a traditional lone-hero story is Samantha 'Deuce' Cordell. She refuses to let Boone be alone in his convictions — or in his doubts. She challenges him, covers his blind spots, and forces him to reckon with a future he didn't ask for.
The best Western partnerships work the same way. Two people who shouldn't trust each other, learning to trust each other anyway. That dynamic translates perfectly across centuries.
I believe we are entering a golden age of genre-blending fiction. Readers are hungry for stories that don't stay in their lanes, that take the best of multiple traditions and forge something new.
The Dust of Ages is my contribution to that conversation. I hope it's the first of many.