Suffering from amnesia thanks to an injury he sustained during the crash, Ma'khleen gratefully accepts help from the occupants of a passing stagecoach: Doc Holliday and boarding-house proprietor Sarah Nevers. Sarah, instantly soft on the handsome stranger, gives him a room and fills him in on the brewing power struggle between the cattle-rustling Clantons and the Earps, who are the law in town but who are themselves nearly as shady as the Clantons. Through Holliday he meets the Earps and impresses them with his lightning-fast draw. He agrees to spy on the Clantons, though they soon become suspicious of the nosy greenhorn called Macklin, who doesn't even know enough to wear a hat.
Another thing he doesn't know is that he's being hunted by two bloodthirsty Kra'agh, scouts for an imminent invasion. Using their biotechnological ability to perfectly disguise themselves as humans, the Kra'agh have infiltrated the Clanton gang and plan to use the power-hungry outlaws to find and kill the unsuspecting Macklin. Fortunately, Macklin's lover and copilot, Dorree, has tracked him down. Can they rescue Sarah, keep from getting marooned, and face down an alien monster that can appear to be anything at all?
If Shatner can do it...
It's irresistible to picture Bruce Boxleitner, who played Captain Sheridan on Babylon 5, casting a flinty eye over a certain rival starship captain's successful Tek series and thinking, "If he can do it, so can I!" This opportunistic image is reinforced by the novel's jacket photograph, which depicts the author in full Babylon 5 regalia--conceding up front that it was Captain Sheridan's cachet, rather than Boxleitner's literary talent, that got this book on the shelves.
What budding talent Boxleitner has is young and raw. He hits all the items on the novice SF writer's checklist: 1) Any combination of letters can be an alien word, as long as it has an apostrophe in it. 2) End a large number of sentences with ellipses so they trail off mysteriously... 3) Stop the action early and often by disgorging all the backstory in long contrived monologues. (And so on.)
Frontier Earth does make an honest and largely successful effort to convey a sense of both time and place and an understanding of the key players in the Tombstone drama. What's missing is synergy. The two interwoven struggles--Macklin/Kra'agh (which is essentially hero versus monster) and Clanton/Earp (which is more nuanced)--should inform and complement each other; but in the end they have nothing to do with each other. At times Macklin's story meshes with the feud; at other times the offworlders seem superimposed, like Han Solo digitally inserted into My Darling Clementine.
Boxleitner clearly tried to create an intriguing young hero and a dastardly new alien race with hints of a grand story on a galactic scale, and he very nearly succeeds. He also clearly hopes to revisit Macklin in future books. Perhaps next time he'll dig deeper.
When I read a new SF author I usually try to figure out his or her attitude toward women, but this book was inconclusive for me. That's partly because it's set in the repressed 1880s, and partly because memory-impaired Macklin has two girlfriends, but dithers around with both of them and doesn't really "get" either. Perhaps he forgot how. -- Mark
