What Priestley was saying, although he might not have been familiar with the term, was that many of these stories were, in fact, Bat Durstons: stories of Westerns genre themes masquerading in Science Fiction tales. We can forget this kind, though its specimens must far outnumber the rest. This is trade rubbish, like the beads and Brummagem gauds that the nineteenth-century traders took with them into the jungle. If such hack work could arouse thought, then we should think what a pity it is that our idiotic species is shortly proposing to spread its dreary melodramatic doings from here to Sirius. The first is bosh consisting of corny short stories, on the gangster or Western pattern, with a few rocketships, atomising pistols, and mysterious planets thrown in they are essentially no different from the stories we used to read about Chicago, Dawson City, and Tombstone, Arizona. The first, the so-called Western aspect of the Science Fiction genre, he declared as being barely fit for human consumption and, by his reckoning, composing the majority of the genre.

Priestley led him to define three types of science fiction. The Galaxy Magazine ad proves that there was a genre of stories, stories found in other magazines, which transported Western genre themes into an Interplanetary setting, and that that style of writing was prevalent enough for a major magazine to advertise against it, that the market was filled with this 'Bat Durston'-style fiction, and that Galaxy Magazine was being published to offer an alternative to the 'discriminating' fan.Įven a (self-admittedly brief) perusal of the Science Fiction genre in 1953 by J. More importantly, the Galaxy Magazine ad shows us that space Westerns are a historically important sub-genre in science fiction that they aren't a new genre, born fully formed from the mind of Joss Whedon and that they have been around since the beginning of science fiction. Many younger science fiction fans, who grew up in the '80s with the overt space Westerns the likes of Bravestarr, Silverhawks, and The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, don't understand the derogatory light in which space Westerns in general have been held. Gold gave space Western stories a beating that it took 30 years to even begin to recover from. The Galaxy Magazine ads produced under the editorship of H. Gold, editor of Galaxy during its 'Bat Durston' ad campaign If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY! Sound alike? They should-one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. 'You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts.' 'Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston,' the tall stranger lipped thinly. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock . . . and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand. Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. 'You don't know it, but this is your last space trip.'

'Get back from those controls, Bat Durston,' the tall stranger lipped thinly. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing . . . and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand. Consider the following ad that emblazoned the back cover of issues of Galaxy Magazine in 1950, in which Bat Durston's reputation was maligned: Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He is THE space cowboy, although you might know him by other names: Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tom Corbett are but a few. Bat Durston is trapped!-trapped, my friends, not in an asteroid mine or a Martian canyon, but in little definitions and in small minds little definitions and small minds that are always looking towards the future, forgetting the whole time the past behind them the very past where the content of those minds has come from.Īnd just who is Bat Durston? He is the folkhero of the space Western genre.

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