Author: Tom Z (---.14.189)
Date: 02-04-2005 03:45
Wow, I rarely read these columns, and I stumbled over this by mistake, but it's so very very cool. The similarity between Star Trek and a Western was clear from inception, and the role of SF and US frontier culture is the same. Of course some have suggested, and the evidence seems to back it up, that the frontier didn't act as a safety valve. Immigrants landed in NewYork etc., then shipped straight out West, or joined existing ethnic groups in settled areas. There was little movement from settled cities to the Frontier, mainly from Europe straight to the Frontier. Not that the Frontier as a concept wasn't a massive part of the US psyche, although the whole obsession with it starts ONCE THE FRONTIER CLOSES..
Anyhoo, even if the effect was actually on Europe initially and then later on, as those migrants become the new citizens of the USA, on the USA, your article takes this and developes some lovely and interesting ideas with it.
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