Desert Settings and How to See the Apocalypse
Authors
Deserts have long been treated as apocalyptic spaces in cultural narratives. This is especially true of science fiction (SF), a genre which, throughout its historical development, has both narrated and critiqued colonialism. This article investigates deserts as apocalyptic settings in some American and Australian SF texts within the context of colonial and Indigenous beliefs and knowledges. I read the apocalyptic as a technique of seeing in relation to desert settings. I treat ‘setting’ as a formal, necessary precondition for narrative development, organising visual fields and producing agential environments.
I then examine literary and filmic examples of SF desert settings with varied dominant perspectives: George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (1981) meditates on settler colonial anxieties in its treatment of the Australian desert as a symbolically rich yet materially empty arid ‘wasteland,’ eliding Indigenous occupation. A similar perspective emerges via Denis Villeneuve’s penchant for using aerial photography to present post-Romantic sublime desert views in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), since desert aerial photography has a specific colonial history dating back to WWI. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) (Villeneuve’s source text) instead privileges the more postcolonial view from below of the “Fremen.” Finally, Claire G. Coleman’s (2017) Terra Nullius is an anticolonial text which shifts between perspectives from above and below. The novel’s radical narrative rupture halfway through re-orients the reader’s understanding of the text’s apocalyptic framework in relation to Indigenous history. Coleman shows how the apocalyptic can be mobilised as a technique of seeing to critique historical injustice in desert SF settings.
