Tevun-Krus #81 - DesertPunk

@Nablai's Nebula

August has knocked on our doors, asking us to wait a wee bit more. In these times of uncertainty, Tevun-Krus leads the beacon of hope, of courage and faith. We are here for you to affirm your belief in goodness of humanity.

This month, we are going to explore a genre that has not been written about much. There's so much yet to be discovered. Beyond the brightly coloured hues, I see something move. The desert beckons me, a mirage in the making. Is this what I'm meant to be--a story unfolding across sands, merging the horizons of reality and space. Presenting Desert Punk along the way.

Deserts have always fascinated the writers' imaginations since the earliest days. They carry magic and monsters, from the giant worm-like creatures to the black scorpions who lure the travellers to their deaths. Desert islands inspired Daniel Defoe's classic tale of Robinson Crusoe. And if R.M. Ballantyne's "The Coral Island" imagined stranded children living idyllically in 1857, along came William Golding a century later with the terrifying "Lord of the Flies" to show the children's descent into cruelty and war.

For generations of science fiction writers, space became the new ocean, and planets the lonely islands lost in the great dark. Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 novel "Farmer in the Sky" became Andy Weir's 2011 novel "The Martian" — both dealing with competent men doing competent things in alien worlds. Others focus on the horror and mystery of islands, such as the world described in Cordwainer Smith's classic "A Planet Named Shayol," in which convicts are exposed to a virus that makes them grow extra organs, which are then harvested.

Shifting sands, the beating hot sun, freezing nights, perilous flora and fauna; makes for a vibrant setting for an adventure, whether of the magical or science fictional variety, and gives rise to a different problem set than that faced by characters in more grassy settings. There's an inherent magic to the desert, a grown-in mysticism that comes with the unknown. It's a landscape that's entirely alien to most of us, unimaginable for its lack of water, alternating burning and freezing temperatures and the strangely absent plant life. The horizon in a desert extends on forever, because there's no humidity to get in the way of our vision. The only real limit is the curvature of the planet, forever changing dunes or the particles in the air. Even the sunsets look different.

The earliest literary commentators on the desert's natural environment included famous authors such as Mark Twain and John Muir, even though neither of them were besotted with the dusty, harsh landscape.

Twain used his experience as a budding newspaperman in Virginia City during the early 1860s, to record his impressions of Nevada in the semi-nonfiction volume "Roughing It". Published in 1872, he recounted his arrival in Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory.

The greatly renowned John Muir had highlighted the bleak grayness of the desert when he wrote about the Nevada region in several chapters of his book "Steep Trails", published posthumously in 1918.

David Teague had pointed out in "The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic" (1997,) that during the years between 1890 and 1910, the emergence of desert landscapes began to be recognised.

The concept had become a common background setting in science fiction. Appearing as early as the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune. The ambiance of the desert planet Arrakis in the Dune franchise drew inspiration from the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf and Mexico. In turn, Dune paved the way for the desert planets like Tatooine, Geonosis, and Jakku, which appear in the Star Wars franchise.

There were many notable desert fantasy and science fiction stories inspired by the geography and cultures of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Prominent amongst them are: N.K. Jemisin's Dreamblood Duology, Saladin Ahmed's Crescent Moon Kingdoms, Tasha Suri's Books of Ambha, Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes and Frank Herbert's Dune.