So in the quest to write a truly American fantasy, I started looking at Westerns, because of course it's the quintessentially American genre.

Question for the assembly: what do you think of when you think of a Western?


There are guns, of course, and horses, and hats, and all those good things - but those are just the set props, the tropes - they are the "envelope" of the genre. Think about fantasy for a sec: the "envelope" includes swords, dragons, and elves, but what is the essence of fantasy?...