Starmen by Francis Hamit

A richly imagined tale of cowboys, aliens, and an ethnographic clash of cultures, Starmen by Francis Hamit is a genre-bending adventure with enough historical touchstones to brilliantly blur the line between fact and fiction.

In this slightly alternate universe, legendary anthropologist George James Frazer travels to El Paso, Texas in 1875 as a young man, acting as the ‘advance man’ for an aeronautical angel from Liverpool with a dirigible at her command. His academic fascination with native cultures, myths, and traditions soon leads him into the secretive world of the local Apaches, as well as the investigative purview of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who suspect he may be a British spy.

The whimsical plot spirals out wildly from there, from natural resource treasure hunts and high-stakes border conflicts to vision quests and Freemason conspiracies, yet the disparate threads of this narrative are loomed by a master craftsman. The book is impressively edited and rings with authenticity in terms of time period, place, and character background. Whether it is 19th-century dialogic idioms or nuanced histories of indigenous ceremonies, the novel effortlessly pulls readers into its semi-fictionalized grip.

Boasting an eccentric cast of three-dimensional characters – scientists, savages, courtesans, lawmen, and law-breakers – this is a mystery, a romance, a spaghetti western, and a fantastical slice of magic realism all rolled into one. The breadth of the story may seem overwhelming, but this is top-shelf historical fiction that defies classification or comparison, for an impressive and original read.