Published in 1998, Jonathan Lethem’s Girl In Landscape takes John Ford’s The Searchers and puts it on an interstellar colony in the far future. Global warming has destroyed planet Earth, and a young girl travels with her father and brother to the new planet, which is inhabited by a seemingly slothful alien race known as Archbuilders. The settler colony is lead by Efram Nugent, a stand in for John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like The Searchers, the novel in an exploration into community, sex, and racism, but given a postmodern twist so it is not a mere copy. The story is told from the perspective of the young girl, Pella, as she contends with both living in a new society and her oncoming sexuality. To give away more of how the conventions are twisted would spoil the read, but the ultimate effect is that of a revisionist space western. As a writer, I am interested in twisting normal tropes and conventions to comment on genre, and this is a good deconstruction of the Western myth.