A post-nuclear science-fiction western set between a ruined Earth and the glittering cities of the Moon
About the Project
Apocalypse Cowboy is a narrative project I’ve developed over more than two decades, taking the shape of a feature screenplay and related media. For the past couple of years, I’ve been compiling selected artifacts into an illustrated, annotated book built around the script.
This microsite is the beginning of what I intend to be an evolving archive of that work and related projects.
Development
Apocalypse Cowboy has been with me, in one form or another, for more than twenty years. Its earliest version dates back to high school. I still have some of my scattered notes and fragmentary writings from that time about Deekan Smith, a neo-cowboy wandering a postwar frontier, who eventually finds himself in the claustrophobic streets of a city on the Moon. The idea grew out of things I loved then and still love now—especially the expansive, operatic westerns of Sergio Leone and the atmospheric cyberpunk of the 1980s.
The story changed as I did, of course. What began in my teenage years as a colorful genre exercise gradually became rooted in thematic concerns about what power looks like after catastrophe, and in the systems that survive the people who built them. Bombs may destroy cities, but what if they do not erase the structures that governed them? What if those structures adapt to the ruins?
Along the way, Apocalypse Cowboy became intertwined with my Bridgetown trilogy, which gave me a way to work backward and discover how Deekan’s world became what it is. But the story itself always remained stubbornly visual in my imagination. I felt I could only really articulate it through the medium of cinema. But how to do that, without a studio or a hundred-million-dollar machine for turning all of this into a major motion picture?
That is the project I am working on now: trying to export that imaginary film from my head into the material world as fully and faithfully as I can. The book, when it’s finished, will be the art object. The screenplay sits at the center, with visual development and worldbuilding growing around it. The goal is to make the imaginary film legible from the outside-in, from the story itself, to the look and texture of the world around it. Although I may never complete it in twenty-four frames a second, what I can make is the blueprint: enough of the movie on paper and in images that it can begin to exist somewhere outside my imagination.
Story
Four years after dropping off the map without explanation, Deekan Smith suddenly reappears in the desert, with no memory of where he has been, what happened to him, or how he acquired dangerous martial abilities he has no memory of learning.
Soon, he’s reunited with his estranged father, Bud Conroy. Under the pseudonym Victor Vox, this aging journalist once rose to fame by chronicling the strange realities and infamous characters of the post-nuclear milieu. Chasing one last big headline, Bud plans to venture to the Moon’s capital, Luna City, to bring to light evidence of earthside atrocities committed by its corporatocracy.
What begins as a father-and-son road trip carries the pair from Earth’s besieged neo-frontier into the bowels of the Moon’s most prosperous city. Along the way, the outer contours of a picture begin to take shape, one which tangles up the mystery of Dee’s missing years with a conflict much larger than either of them can fully understand.
World
A generation has passed since nuclear war, and civilization has survived in radically different forms on Earth and the Moon.
THE AMALGAMATED ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
The AEA emerged from the ruins of the atomic war as one of the most powerful
institutions in the surviving world. It
presents itself as the force that rebuilt global trade and infrastructure, and
imposed a new kind of order on a broken civilization. Planetside, however, its
Earth Reconstruction Corps is seen very differently. It is as an occupying force,
solidifying corporate power through military control and overwhelming technological
superiority.
THE FEDERATED SOUTHWEST UNION
A battered federation of communities in the American Southwest attempting to
remain independent of AEA control. Its capital, Nightwood, is a fortified desert
city swollen with refugees and scarred by years of war. The FSU is badly
outmatched in resources and technology, but remains one of the most irritating
organized obstacles to the AEA’s expansion across Earth.
LUNA CITY
Humanity’s great city on the Moon: a network of enclosed arcologies linked by
vast transit systems and artificial environments.
Its upper districts are a neon consumer paradise of restaurants, shops,
penthouses, advertising, and manufactured skies. Far below, workers live in aging
concrete levels full of mildew and leeching machine oil, where resentment toward
the AEA has begun to harden into organized resistance.
Bridgetown Connection
Apocalypse Cowboy takes place in the alternate history first documented in my Bridgetown novel trilogy. There, three Californians from 1970 are thrown into 1897, where their arrival alters the development of the American West and the wider world.
Thanks to their actions, technologies emerge ahead of schedule. History diverges far enough that the world eventually produces the atomic war, Luna City, and the political order seen in Apocalypse Cowboy.
To be clear, the screenplay stands on its own. But Bridgetown is the deeper history undergirding it, and both are playing in a kind of metaphysical sandbox that presents its own lore conceits that run through the connected works.
Concept Art
Visual Archive
Visual Archive Note: Concept artwork presented here is developed through an iterative mixed-media process combining original hand-drawn digital illustration with generative imagery used for augmentation and refinement.
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