Speculative Fiction

I've always loved the idea of playing around with conventions. With a show like Firefly, and later the movie Serenity, the twist was that it was a space Western. Memorable characters went a long way towards making the show(s) so memorable to me, but a great deal of the charm lay in the meshing of two familiar tropes. It wasn't the first time something like this was done, particularly the space cowboys theme, but it is a good example of freshening up genres that have been reduced to familiar, tired cliches.

I've been trying to figure out a twist on this that we could shoot, a weird meshing of genres that could be produced on no-budget. It's tricky, especially when one of the genres would usually be something that would involve special effects, an area we have no knowledge in and are regrettably unprepared to approach. So what if we took a genre stereotype and inserted him into a regular story set in a regular world?

Say a vicious gunslinger with a twist who is quick on the draw, loves a good drink, and is always ready for a tumble with women of ill virtue. A character who was...

Photo by: Patrick Gilbert

I think that could actually work. This might be my first meshing of molds, but at the very least, it's definitely another idea to pollute my mind...