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.

Worthy of mention are these: Trinity Sight by Jennifer Givhan(2019), House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. Stephen King's The Dark Tower makes the cut too.

Writers around the world have inevitably loved the desert for its blank, pitiless and full of possible scenarios. The element of nothingness invites creativity to seduce and conjure the most amazingly inexplicable worlds to develop their full potential. The desert's famine allows for all sorts of creatures to evolve aggressively to survive-making them a rebel of nature. It probably makes sense when the stories that materialize from the deserts often break traditional norms, reinvent narrative framework and are confident enough to be cocky.

You can bring home the desert with these brilliant must-reads:

1) Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Hererra

Summary: On the first page of this slim, powerful novel, we meet our sixteen year old narrator, Makina, who's charged with hand-carrying a note from her mother in Mexico all the way to her brother in the United States. "I don't like to send you, child," Cora tells her, "but who else can I trust it to, a man?" Nope! So Makina sets off alone, first to gather intel for her journey from a series of local jefes, and then, with their blessing, she departs into the desert alone, picking her way towards our inhospitable border, hazarded by numerous mortal and political obstacles on the way. The division of family and the question of true reunification is one Hererra wants us to ponder, while Makina's heartbreaking passage exposes the vulnerability of bodies and the violent schisms between men, women and country.

2) The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams

Summary: Alice, Corvus and Annabel are three young women coming of age in a small town in the Arizona desert. The girls spend their time stalking cats, blowing shit up, and being embarrassed by their parents, respectively—pretty true to life, in other words—but the novel's more crucial enterprise is Williams' devastating reflection on the banality of death. Among the girls, Alice is the guerrilla environmentalist, Corvus is the grave and solemn orphan grieving over her parents' death, and Annabel is the late-to-town transplant whose arrival incites our tour of the town's eclectic personalities and pedestrian violence, a place where roadkill leaves a "rosy kiss on the pavement," elderly men and women wither "like iguanas" in a nearby nursing home, and vengeful, backtalking ghosts materialize with unsettling aplomb. Williams' prose is artful and precise, the story is comic and outrageously clever, and the starkness of Williams' narrative ecosphere exerts an intense pressure on her female characters to transmute their surroundings and become "extraordinary."

3) On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Summary: Shannon Pufahl's On Swift Horses is an elegant, powerful novel about Muriel, a deceptively coy San Diego newlywed (by way of rural, postwar Kansas), and her shrewd brother-in-law Julius, a rambling cardshark betting his life on luck's mercurial bidding. The two gamblers share an early connection before their fates diverge—Muriel becomes involved in the aggressive, male-dominated universe of horse-racing at Del Mar, and Julius flees to the old Las Vegas, that glamorous, mafia-orchestrated oasis whose surreptitious thrill was once a provisional lapse of repressive post-war social conventions. One of the unique pleasures of Pufahl's seamlessly-researched novel is the momentary return to a less-excessive American excess —when the purchase of an ocean-proximate California home by regular, hardworking Americans wasn't a laughable possibility; when Las Vegas had yet to be rebuilt into a 24-hour landlocked Royal Caribbean. It's the kind of nostalgia that can only be enjoyed from the safe distance of (arguable) progress, especially by all those who were never been invited to partake in America's middle class comforts. On Swift Horses is a solemn reminder of the resilience of generations of Americans who survived our country's violent past, a timely reminder of the modern consequences of failing to relinquish its dogged shadow, and a heartbreaking elegy to those who never made it out.

4) The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Arguably the most famous of Michael Ondaatje's novels, this story opens with Hana, a young Canadian nurse stranded in the bombed-out ruins of an Italian villa during WWII. Hana has remained in the villa long after everyone else has fled to provide care for the English Patient, as he is rather arbitrarily named, a man burned beyond recognition, without face or country, who can recall nothing about who he is beyond a fractured key of memories—a violent plane crash and its subsequent blaze; the dry North African desert where he wakes bewildered and nearly blind, salvaged from the wreckage by Bedouin tribesmen who dress his charred body and carry him between them in a makeshift hammock they move across the dusty landscape.

Hana listens to the patient's fragmented evocations of the desert as the pair is joined by two other stragglers from the war—Kip, a British Sikh sapper disillusioned with his time in the army, and Carvaggio, a charming criminal and former friend of Hana's father. The novel's setting is poignantly charged and the cast of characters are rich and diverse, their discordant backgrounds clashing to reveal the most surprising harmonies—and it's only Ondaatje's lush, lyric sentences that feel exotic, begging to be read aloud. This is a novel that meditates on loss, but what it interrogates is identity—who are we without our families, our pasts, our nationalities to shape us? How are we made, and how must we survive? The English Patient maps the delicate bonds and limitations between friends, and explores the "physical and spiritual sense of loneliness" that haunts all human experience.

5) Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

This novel takes place in dry, hot Spain. It's the story of Sofia, an anthropologist who begrudgingly cares for her mother Rose. They go to Spain to see a doctor who might be able to cure Rose of a bunch of medical ailments, but it all gets a bit mysterious from there. The ocean is the only solace from the heat in this strange desert town, but it's full of jellyfish. Like the ocean full of jellyfish, this short novel reads eerily like something bad is always about to happen.

6) A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres is the story of an Iowa farmer who decides to retire and split his thousand acres of farmland between his three children. This sparks a huge family drama, and all sorts of domestic issues bubble to the surface. There are lots of long, hot summer days in the cornfields, followed by long, hot nights with little to do except play board games and drink.

7) Holes by Louis Sachar

Holes is a classic desert novel! Stanley Yelnats is sent to a detention camp for young boys out in the desert (because his family is cursed and Stanley is wrongly convicted of stealing a pair of sneakers). There, all the boys have to dig holes all day long in the blistering heat, which, according to the Camp Warden, is supposed to "build character." But it turns out there's so much more mystery to uncover in the desert in this novel.

I'm sure there must be many more stories to discover when we search further. Feel free to drop some of your favourites in the comments below.

This is where we bid adieu, with a promise to meet next time! We'll be back with another exciting genre. So, stay tuned, stay safe and happy! ❤ Till we meet again, this is Nab signing off =]