26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Maddening (spoiler warning), December 27, 2010
This review is from: The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale (Paperback)
I wanted to love this book because it sounded like a fun little steampunk western romp. However one thing kept me from enjoying the book....nothing happens.
Don't get me wrong, things do happen but I hardly consider one sentence descriptions to be action scenes. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Half a page. The climactic showdown that's been promised for the entire book? Half a page. The ending? A 1 page cliffhanger that sets it up for a sequel.
The rest of the book consists of getting breakfast and chatting in saloons and a wh@re house. Characters go talk to another character for a page, then back to the saloon. They wake up, get breakfast, go visit a character, then back to the saloon. Oh, Bat Masterson is, get this, turned into a bat! So there's plenty of dialogue about how to keep him caged up at night. It's 300 pages of this. I'm not even exaggerating, nothing happens except talk, talk, talk, solve the problem in a paragraph. There's no exciting or engaging solutions to any problems in this book, they're just there and then they're not.
I'm only giving this 3 stars because the dialogue and characterisations are very well written. Other than that I found it to be an absolute sleeping pill. Don't be fooled by the book description and go in expecting an action novel because it's not. I like Mr. Resnick's work but this book just felt completely lazy and phoned in. He had some good ideas that could have been alot of fun but didn't quite seem to know what to do with them. Seek out Ivory or Dragon America instead if you want a good Mike Resnick novel.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Steampunk fans will enjoy the ride, but The West was left in the dust, and I mourn its absence., January 3, 2011
This review is from: The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale (Paperback)
Plot Summary: The year is 1881, and Tombstone, Arizona is a town like no other. Served by horseless stagecoaches and illuminated by electric lights, this dusty town hosts the premiere inventors in the country, Thomas Edison and Ned Buntline. The U.S. government charges the Earps - Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan - with protecting Mr. Edison from all enemies, and they send for their friends, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson. This dream team will face not just the Clanton gang, but some fearsome medicine men, and a quick-draw corpse that used to be Johnny Ringo.
The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale succeeds with the steampunk, but it never cowboy'd up to the culture. I think it had the potential to be great, but there were too many misses along the way. For instance, the dialog was disappointingly bland. I wanted to hear the Old West come alive in the poetry and cadence of the language, but everyone's speech was far too contemporary for a historical setting. I kept trying to insert an accent, but it wouldn't stick. Just a little bit of Mark Twain's voice would have given the whole story a flavor of authenticity. The only exchanges with any spark occurred between Doc Holliday and his sometime lady-love, Big Nose Kate:
<Quote>
He was suddenly overcome by a paroxysm of coughing, and sat down again. She brought him a handkerchief, and he handed it back to her a few minutes later when he was done.
"That's more blood than usual," she noted, staring at it.
"I don't know what you expect me to do about it. Cough out the window, maybe."
She stared at him for a long moment. "I don't know which to do," she said at last, "nurse you or kick you in the balls."
"Do I get a vote?" he asked. (241)
<End Quote>
I was excited to see this Wild West dream team of gunfighters assembled, but the reason behind it was too vague to drum up any further enthusiasm. We learn that the U.S. Government wants to expand across the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and they believe that Thomas Edison is their single best asset for overcoming the magic-wielding Native Americans. The Earps, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday are to protect Edison and his partner, Ned Buntline at all costs. This leads to the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but unfortunately the setup was so generic that it didn't give me much of a mystery to chew on in between.
The steampunk elements brought a glow to my brass-plated heart, and here is where The Buntline Special shined. The descriptions and illustrations were the stuff of steamies' dreams, and I happily plunged into the mechanized world of horseless carriges, gatling revolvers, and, er, metal "working girls." It was all well done, and by far, my favorite part of the story.
Steampunk fans will enjoy the ride, but the west was left in the dust, and I mourn its absence. This could have been amazing if The Buntline Special had truly joined The Weird with The Old West.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A great idea...but., December 31, 2010
This review is from: The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale (Paperback)
This was a great idea for a steampunk western tale but the author doesn't do much with it. It's a shame really he could have done so much more than what he did. A lot of talking but not much happening. The author would have been better suited to create orginal characters and put them into a steampunk western. This is an alternate universe but the author seemed unwilling or too lazy to go all the way with it.
At the end there's an unneeded history lesson that consumes way too much space than could have been better used to expand the story.
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