Mapping the Apocalypse
Deserts, Apocalyptic Science Fiction and Colonialism
By Adam Stock
What is the link between deserts, science fiction and colonialism? CAPAS Fellow Adam Stock examines the cultural and historical perceptions of deserts, particularly through the lens of European colonialism and apocalyptic science fiction. In his article, he traces the development of images of deserts, from the 18th century view of deserts as destroyed forests to contemporary representations in media such as WALL-E. In doing so, he emphasises the political implications of desert imaginaries and argues that apocalyptic narratives can offer insights into power dynamics and colonial encounters.
The idea of deserts as unoccupied, uncultivated land unsuitable for pasture has a long cultural history. But as Diana Davis notes in The Arid Lands (2016) in the eighteenth century some Europeans began to perceive deserts as “ruined” former forests, where the felling of trees had caused drought and aridity. A similar logic is employed at the start of Andrew Stanton’s Disney Pixar film WALL-E (2008), in which the camera sweeps through the galaxy down to a deserted and desertified planet lacking any plant life, where the eponymous trash-compacting robot lives.
WALL-E reflects the post-Enlightenment belief that deserts are produced through human activity. While the film lays the blame on consumer waste (as if the trash itself produces the climate), historically European colonisers blamed traditional nomadic grazing techniques and a lack of proper stewardship by “uncultivated” desert inhabitants. The late nineteenth-century utopian colonial dream to “make the desert bloom”, a phrase later used as a rallying call by Zionists including early Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol, assumed tree-planting and agriculture could “restore” deserts to a mythical Arcadian past.
Such agricultural science narratives developed alongside representations of dystopian and apocalyptic desert environments in the emerging genre of science fiction. Mars became the desert planet par excellence for stories exploring colonial treatments of arid environments. In an article on “Martian Modernism” for Modernism/Modernity Print+ (2022), Eric Aronoff argues that Ray Bradbury’s story “--And the Moon Be Still as Bright” from The Martian Chronicles (1948) “revises the mythology of frontier expansion in the American West, with Martians in the role of ‘the American Indian’… lamenting the destruction wrought by the pioneers”.
Chickenpox, recently introduced by humans, has killed all Martians, leaving behind empty but perfectly preserved villages and towns. Arriving with a rowdy rocket crew, an anthropologist named Spender disappears to study these artefacts. Realising the Martian culture’s embodiment of ancient and harmonious values he decides to kill the crew rather than allow them to colonise and destroy the towns. During a brief truce, Spender tells the captain, “No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves”. Yet Spender’s attitude is questionable too: he treats recently inhabited Martian towns as timeless artefacts of a distant past civilisation, much as American anthropologists sought to preserve the cultures of once highly populous Indigenous nations in colonial museums.
Bradbury’s speculative treatment of Mars reflects some of the historical reality of Indigenous peoples who have experienced genocide and forced removals from ancestral lands. As Nathalie Koch argues in a 2021 article for Geoforum entitled “Whose apocalypse?”, “the curious consistency of the desert in… apocalyptic imaginaries poses important questions about who specifically draws on these tropes and narrative threads and, in turn, whose apocalypse “we” are being sold”. In this regard, the perspectives from which cultural depictions of deserts are written, the way in which such terrains are imagined, and how we are oriented toward them has important political implications. As Sara Ahmed argues in Queer Phenomenology (2008), our orientations shape our perspectives, our knowledge base, and “‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy toward”. This interacts in important ways with the environment around us. For example, in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), the doomed Duke Leto Atreides sees the planet Arrakis at night as “barren rock, dunes, and blowing dust, an uncharted dry wilderness”, but, cast out into the desert, his son Paul, who takes up the mantle of a Messiah to the native Fremen, finds “a beautiful place… like a fairyland” full of “bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves – all trembling in the moonlight”.
The implications of viewing a colonial desert terrain from an apocalyptic perspective is critically explored in Claire G Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2017), an alien invasion novel initially presented as if set in early twentieth century Australia. Alien outsiders experience the Australia as an “alien landscape”, with “alien trees… the wrong colour” dotting the “alien, Native bush”, and Natives who are “merely part of the inhospitable environment they are trying to tame”. Against this, Native characters see the geological forms and fauna of their environment as co-constitutive parts of web-of-life relations, in line with Aboriginal cosmology. Coleman’s novel produces Australia as a postapocalyptic space which fundamentally challenges European perspectives on human/non-human/other-than-human relations. Halfway through, the novel reveals the events of the story are set in 2041. Readers are wrenched from a temporal perspective (of the past) into another (of a speculative future), functioning to make them re-view the past from the perspective of the colonised. This simple apocalyptic revelation has deceptively complex results: the crossing and mapping of the Australian interior is seen elegiacally as one of the last places to resist the advance of European colonialism, and World-ending at a local level is identified with planetary upheaval. Colonialism (rather than indigeneity) becomes metonymically identified with the alien other.
Despite occupying 40-45% of the Earth’s landmass and supporting 38% of its population deserts and their inhabitants have often been treated as marginal by Europeans. Dominant western imaginaries frequently read deserts as empty, ruined, and allied to the phantasms of Christian eschatology. But the apocalyptic can also provide a map to the suspension or reversal of power structures. By reading the apocalyptic as what, in his provocative text Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Evan Calder Williams terms “a spatial organization” rather than merely a temporal event, new perspectives emerge on colonial encounters in arid lands.
Languages of the Anthropocene
Adam Stock presented his research on desert imaginaries at the international multidisciplinary conference "Languages of the Anthropocene", which took place in Rome from 18 to 20 June 2024. Launched in 2023, this annual conference offers a comparative analysis and collective rethinking of the role of language(s) in the personal, communal, transnational and planetary confrontation with environmental catastrophe. It is jointly organised by the British School in Rome and University College London: Cities Partnerships Programme (CPP) and UCL Anthropocene, the Heidelberg Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Sapienza University Rome and the Department of Humanities, Roma Tre University, Rome.
About the Author
Adam Stock is a Fellow at CAPAS and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at York St John University, UK.His research seeks to better understand the intersection between political thought and representations of temporality and space in modern and contemporary culture, especially speculative fictions.