Just as humans share a great deal of DNA with every other animal on Earth, all literary genres contain similar fundamental elements. We know printed storytelling goes back centuries, but we also know that conventions, formats, and tropes continue to develop and evolve.
It’s no secret that modern genres have adopted traits and characteristics from older counterparts and contemporaries, just as stories of the Old West have done so from earlier writings. But for now, let’s take a look at a few story elements science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres borrowed from foundational Westerns.
The Lone Hero/Outsider
From The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia to Stephen King’s Roland in The Dark Tower, this character type is often a mysterious, complex outsider who brings justice or change to a broken world. Owen Wister not only established the Western genre we know today with his novel The Virginian (1902), but he also created a hero archetype defined by an internal code that sets him apart from the masses or the environment of his world—a moral code guided by personal ethics over legal or societal norms. It established a character type we’ve seen in Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars, as well as Harry Dresden from Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files.
Critique of Religious Authoritarianism
Long before Margaret Atwood gave us The Handmaid’s Tale, before we received Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, or even Doria Russell’s The Sparrow or its sequel Children of God, the critique of religious power had been made decades prior with Zane Grey’s 1912 Western novel Riders of the Purple Sage. Grey portrays the story’s Mormon Elders as corrupt and tyrannical, which was an extremely bold move for his time. This developed the controversial theme of questioning established authority. Riders of the Purple Sage set the stage for Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune. Both Riders of the Purple Sage and Dune are clearly significant works that use the medium of genre fiction to explore moral and spiritual questions. Dune literally launched Grey’s frontier justice and religious critique into the stars.
The Bounty Hunter
The bounty hunter storyline can be found in nearly every literary genre today, and is prevalent in movies, television, and even video games. Star Wars comes to mind (especially with The Mandalorian) as an entertainment entity that has taken the concept into new realms. And although bounty hunters were certainly depicted as ancillary characters in dime Westerns before it, Elmore Leonard’s debut novel, The Bounty Hunters (1953), gives us the first instance of a bounty hunter as the central protagonist in literature. This novel blazed a trail for such works as Janet Evanovich and Steve Hamilton’s The Bounty, the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey, as well as Blade Runner, Firefly, and even the John Wick films, to name a few.
Mob Mentality and the Dangers of Vigilante Justice
Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as the 1957 film 12 Angry Men all explore the dangers of mob mentality and vigilante justice. But before any of them came on the scene, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) offered powerful criticism of extrajudicial violence—how people, driven by fear, anger, and a thirst for retribution, can abandon moral judgment and due process. The novel dramatizes the tragic consequences of groupthink, where individuals suspend personal responsibility in favor of following the will of the crowd. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Stephen King's Needful Things all follow with a focus on ordinary people doing horrific things in the name of order, as well as acting before understanding.
The Great Unknown
Captain James T. Kirk regarded space as the “final frontier” during his opening monologue in the original Star Trek series, which alludes to the preceding frontier known as the American West. After all, creator Gene Roddenberry described the show as a “Wagon Train to the Stars.” Exploration in hopes of a fresh start in life is a staple of the Western genre, possibly its most defining. Legendary Western author Louis L’Amour explored this territory as much as anyone. His first full-length novel, Hondo, which was adapted from his short story “The Gift of Cochise” and later made into a John Wayne film, offers a marvelous example of the frontier realm of the unknown, both physically and morally. While Hondo may appear to be a straightforward Western, it truly laid the narrative groundwork that would inspire or echo across decades of frontier-driven science fiction—from the starships of Star Trek to the sandworms of Dune and even the dusty outposts of The Mandalorian.
Environmental Antagonists
We know the theme of Man vs. Nature wasn’t invented with the advent of the Western novel, but it certainly became part of the great unknown typically found in frontier fiction. But let’s be honest: when we think of Man vs. Nature, tremendous disasters come to mind—hurricanes, floods, and even debilitating winter storms. However, in his 1973 novel, The Time it Never Rained, Elmer Kelton’s drought-choked Texas becomes a study of endurance, which influenced climate fiction (cli-fi) and grimdark fantasy, where survival against nature and society is the story. For instance, in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novels, The Windup Girl and The Water Knife, we see echoes of Kelton’s themes of endurance and resource scarcity amid environmental collapse. And although more overtly weird fiction and ecological horror, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books echo the anxiety around altered ecologies and human helplessness in the face of environmental forces we find in Kelton’s masterpiece.
Reluctant Warrior Who Cannot Escape Violence
This is a heavily mined theme today, with characters like Wolverine in the movie Logan, Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and even Joel Miller from the video game-turned-television series The Last of Us. All of these have a predecessor in Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Shane, which distilled the tragic, mysterious hero motif, influencing countless protagonists who try to leave violence behind but are pulled back into it. For instance, William F. Nolan’s Logan’s Run, P.D. James’s Children of Men, and even The Road by Cormac McCarthy. However, Michael R. Underwood’s Annihilation Aria takes the theme and makes it something new, all while keeping the core foundations. Like Shane, the protagonist Max is a lethal fighter trying to leave violence behind, but is drawn back into a fight to protect others. Shane is a gunslinger who wants peace but picks up the gun again to save a family. Max is a former war hero dragged back into galactic conflict to defend the innocent. Both works ask a powerful question: Can someone be a good person if they’re only good at violence?
The Other
Although there were science fiction novels that dealt with themes of alien encounters and interactions prior to A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Way West, very few had more substance than mere fear of the other. But let’s be honest, most Western novels up to that point were similar in their portrayal of Native American encounters and interactions. However, Native Americans in Guthrie’s novel are depicted as independent agents, often acting based on tribal diplomacy rather than hostility. We see the settlers grappling with fear, ignorance, and at times, admiration for Native ways. The novel treats cultural clashes as foreign worldviews rather than simple good vs. evil, mirroring how speculative fiction handles alien or fantastical peoples. Like a starship venturing into unknown space, the wagon train’s journey becomes a metaphor for first contact and intercultural misunderstanding. I can’t help but think of Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Lovecraft Country, but also Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, as well as the Unspeakable Horror anthology series edited by Vince Liaguno, which beautifully delves into LGBTQ+ issues with regard to The Other.
Coming of Age / Loss of Innocence
Now this is a theme that obviously goes back further than the Western genre, but I think it is safe to say that Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968) gives us a central character who is a child, yet does not treat the story or character lightly. All too often, people think “true grit” in this story refers to the Rooster Cogburn character, made famous by John Wayne in the first movie and later by Jeff Bridges, but the true depiction is clearly of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, who seeks revenge for her murdered father. This story pushes this young girl out of childhood and into an ugly world where she handles herself with dignity and determination. The mix of gritty realism and quirky, humorous voice helped shape the tone of modern urban fantasy and weird westerns. Its strong young narrator also influenced the rise of genre fiction featuring youthful, female perspectives. In fact, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, His Dark Materials' Lyra Belacqua, and Clary Fray of The Mortal Instruments embody similar grit, independence, and moral complexity.
The contributions made by the Western genre continue to inform and inspire new literary and artistic explorations. Its tropes remain foundational to the narrative structures of multiple genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Owen Wister’s The Virginian may have been the seminal work of the Western genre, but its DNA persists, cross-pollinating with other genres to explore the enduring human concerns of identity, morality, and survival. Through this shared heritage, the Western’s influence in literature and entertainment proves as boundless as the frontiers it first depicted.