E.S. Raye

When I set to writing my upcoming space-western, Gas Giant Gambit: A Tale From Beyond the Cygnus Rift, I knew I wanted to subvert as many tropes as I possibly could. I love westerns, but the vast majority of them stick to the common tropes without much deviation and I wanted to have as much fun with that as I could.

With this in mind, I knew the very first, and possibly most important thing to subvert would be my main character.

From Shane to A Fistful of Dollars, The Magnificent Seven, and and John Wayne movie you can think of, the protagonist is nearly universally male. And I mean male. Always a rough and tumble man’s man, with the most masculine characteristic possible. So this is where I needed to start.

I decided immediately that my main character needed to be a woman, like Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead. And not only that but also a gay woman. And so my drifter was created. Sure, she’s a classic anti-hero, complete with the bounty hunting profession and a greedy streak a mile wide, but unlike Clint Eastwood, she would be underestimated everywhere she went, which would give her a nice chip on her shoulder.

What’s more, the masculine sexuality of most Western protagonists is right up front, often directly in your face. With mine, I wanted to make it clear she’s gay, but sex is not one of her major driving points. In fact, she’d much rather be out on her own, staying as free from commitment and obligation as humanly possible.

Once I had this woman protagonist, I needed to drape her in the accouterments of Western main characters. It’s for this reason she dons an old, dirty poncho (over a more sci-fi-esque flight suit), smokes hand-rolled cigars from non-cloned tobacco, and wears an ancient beam-shooter (laser gun) sling low on her left hip.

(For no rational reason, I am fascinated with left-handed characters, especially “good guys.” I, myself, am right-handed, but so many villains over the centuries have been left-handed it has become a sort of short-hand to show there is something… off… about a character. I just love making protagonists left-handed.)

Finally, she needed a name. But I didn’t want to give her one. Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name trilogy is among my favorite movies of all time, and I wanted that for me. A character so mysterious and unknowable that they literally don’t even have a name. But that doesn’t work for a novel – you need to call them something.

This is where another character, Moe, the robot farmhand (or space cowboy, if you will) comes in. He has something of a programming error that causes him to call everyone “Gus,” a name my space-faring drifter was all too happy to adopt.

Where the name came from, I cannot say. It just felt right. And so, she is Gus. And I’m honestly not really even sure what her real name is. And I sort of like it that way.