That water isn't going to loot itself...
"Allow Me to explain. About 50 years ago the foolish practices of the humans combined with natural disasters to destroy most of the world except for this terrible desert...
...Not that a little global holocaust discouraged the humans from pursuing their foolish wars. Then when we thought everything had calmed down, the single river that sustained this world, the life of our desert, suddenly stopped...
...With absolutely no chance of rain, as usual, more deaths are predicted."
...Not that a little global holocaust discouraged the humans from pursuing their foolish wars. Then when we thought everything had calmed down, the single river that sustained this world, the life of our desert, suddenly stopped...
...With absolutely no chance of rain, as usual, more deaths are predicted."
The term "Wagon Train to the Stars" had more relevance than we thought. Much of humanity has gone to outer space, but apparently all the planets they could settle on were dry, desert-covered worlds.
A big advantage of setting a sci-fi world in a desert is that it's easy to conceptualize, compared to a geographically and culturally diverse world like Earth. The author doesn't have to spend time explaining the history or nuance of the world because there is none. Also, judging by the planets we've been finding around other stars in recent years, while potentially inhabitable planets seem plentiful, earthlike ones seem slightly rarer, with slight variations in size, composition, and average temperature making the difference between an Earthlike mixture and a comparative entirely desert world. A moderately large galactic empire would almost certainly put up at least a token effort at setting up outpost colonies on some of the less pleasant worlds, if just to have a place to put your Landfill Beyond the Stars.
When life becomes hard, and on such a world, it usually is, morals are the first thing you throw away. Law and order are swift to break down, and suddenly we have The Wild West, but on another planet. Also, it's wise to be wary of Desert Bandits.
Alternate version: deserted lands After the End (usually nuclear wars). Compare Ocean Punk. See also Cattle Punk and Scavenged Punk.
For the anime and manga that is also an example of the genre, see Desert Punk (1997).
Desert Planet Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Children of the Whales features a small community of less than 600 people living on the Mud Whale, a floating city of clay and magic that sails a seemingly endless sea of sand, with most of its inhabitants being "Marked" - a short-lived people who have psychic control over an emotion-based power called Thymia. The inhabitants supplement the produce from their farms with salvage of things found in the desert before the scavenged location eventually sinks through the sand.
- Orgos from Desert Coral.
- Trigun was probably the first big one, at least as far as anime goes, though it's also a very good trope example, and justifies the setting very well. Long story short: They were going to terraform the planet (or even just find a better one), but the Big Bad tried to kill everyone and screwed it up.
- GUN×SWORD is set on the "Planet of Endless Illusion", a place where rogues of all sorts gather. The protagonist, Van, travels the world searching for a man with a clawed right hand who killed his bride. He is joined by several other travelers along the way, each linked to the clawed man by a personal loss.
- Sands of Destruction takes place In a World… where Sand Is Water, meaning that the whole planet is a desert except for islands of land which is capable of supporting plant life. The manga is the same in terms of setting, though its plot is wildly different.
- Zoids has a considerable amount of this, seeing that the planet Zi is mostly desert.
Films — Live-Action
- Arrakis in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two is a harsh, yet hospitable desert planet where the human colonists must adapt to the immense heat and aggressive sand worms.
- The live-action Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie takes place in Dinohattan, a New York-style city surrounded by endless desert.
- Nimbus III in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
- Tatooine and Jakku from Star Wars are also fairly shining examples of this trope. Tatooine is a desert backwater world that plays this trope very straight, while Jakku is a Landfill Beyond the Stars with more of a scavenger punk aesthetic.
Literature
- Ian McDonald's Ares Express and Desolation Road are this away from the urban zones. In the cities it's a mix of Diesel Punk and Cyberpunk.
- Cthulhu Armageddon by C.T. Phipps: The world is majority desert and wasteland. Most animals and plants have been killed alongside humanity. A huge amount of the remaining lifeforms of both have been mutated. It is a struggle for everyone left just to survive. Even the stars are different.
- Dune and its sequels are especially prominent examples of desert punk scifi, though thematically it resembles a Heroic Fantasy more than Desert Punk. Except that in Dune it's not so much The Wild West in space as The Middle East (in space.)
- The John Carter of Mars novels take place on a Mars that is, mostly, a desert except for the areas bordering the canal network, a region surrounding an underground sea at the south pole, and a few swamps, which represent all that is left of the once-great oceans covering the planet. There is apparently still groundwater deep below the surface, though, since some plants and animals do manage to survive despite the complete lack of rainfall. Probably the Trope Maker.
- The Martian comes as close to this trope as a work of hard sci-fi possibly can.
- The Pit Dragon Chronicles take place on the harsh desert planet of Austar IV. Once used to dispose of criminals, Austar IV has now flourished, under a system of masters and 'bonders', a lower class that has to pay a bond price to rise up in the world.
- Railsea takes place in a world where the "oceans" are barren, monster infested wastelands crisscrossed by railroads.
- The Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future books by Mike Resnick. The setting of the novel is the Inner Frontier (the region toward the core of the Galaxy) of the interstellar Democracy which humans have formed. The title character, Santiago, is the most sought-after outlaw of the region if not the human universe.
- The first volume of Tales from the Year Between, 'Achten Tan', is set in a dried-up bonewaste where a city built in the enormous ribs of a long-dead leviathan is surrounded by miles and miles of dead sand.
Live-Action TV
- On Earth2, the equipment and the costumes of the Eden Advance survivors (survivors of a crashed advanced scout ship that arrived at an Earth-like planet ahead of the main colonial transport) lent themselves to a Desert Punk feeling in many episodes, although the planet G-889's terrain was more varied than just a desert planet, and the group experienced different seasons as they traveled toward their original target destination. The Desert Punk equipment included futuristic Humvee trucks and dune buggies, cool guns, high-tech but utilitarian survival gear, and costumes that became more rugged and patched up as time wore on for the group on their journey.
- In Firefly many border worlds and moons, as well as those on the Rim are only marginally terraformed, generally resulting in them being deserts or borderline. More affluent or Alliance worlds in the Core are more idyllic in terms of atmosphere.
- Star Trek:
- Any story set on Vulcan, a world covered by desert and home to "sandfire storms", haboobs mixed with lightning.
- You know, in Star Trek (the original series in particular) every place they go seems to be a desert. And they all look suspiciously similar...
- Reversed on Terra Nova. The general feel of desert punk is there, especially with the Sixers, but it's set in the jungles of the Mesozoic.
Music
- The album Dopesmoker by Sleep has this sort of setting. It's a concept album about the holy pilgrimage of the Weedians as they journey across a vast desert, following the smoke towards riff filled lands. It's like a stoner metal Book of Exodus. The album's iconic cover artwork depicts a caravan of hooded figures with gas masks (that are implied to basically act as bongs) travelling over the sand dunes, with two moons in the sky and a space ship on the horizon. Needless to say, it rules.
Tabletop Games
- Shows up from time to time in BattleTech, particularly on some of the less habitable worlds in the Periphery, where there's far less advanced technology available (to the point that some planets have an average tech level that's lower than 20th Century Earth) and the inhabitants get preyed on by pirates and gangs.
- The RPG Burning Sands, being (by the author's admission) heavily inspired by Dune, is another example.
- Dungeons & Dragons' Dark Sun campaign setting. This also crosses over with Burned-Out Earth as the planet of Athas used to be greener before Defiler mages burned away most of the plant life.
- Games Workshop games:
- Gorkamorka has been described as Mad Max with Orks. The game revolves around bands of Orks roving the deserts of the desolate world Angelis, fighting each other in ramshackle vehicles while searching for scrap, adding communist goblins and scientist mutants, and for some Hilarious in Hindsight goodness, pale-skinned humans who really want to be orks and are good with tech.
- The Ash Wastes setting for Necromunda sees gangs of mutants, lizard riding nomads, and outcasts driving rust-covered vehicles clashing in the industrial wastes that separate the Necromundan Hive Cities.
- Heavy Gear takes place on Terranova, a primarily desert planet where water is scarce and concentrated in a handful of major lakes and the ice caps. The bulk of the game takes place at the equator, with a particularly expansive desert belt cut off from the nicer parts of the planet by extremely difficult mountains. Most of the game's decades-long civil war takes place in this hostile wasteland and as such military skirmishes are a common sight, making things even more difficult in the hardscrabble lives of settlers in the area. This is not helped by the numerous Desert Bandits infesting the wastes either.
- Space 1889 Caravans of Mars and Steppelords of Mars have elements of desert punk, particularly some illustrations.
Toys
- BIONICLE: Bara Magna from 2009 is a desert planet where organic being with cybernetic enhancements fight in gladiator-style arena matches for whatever resources are left over. Originally the planet and its inhabitants were part of Spherus Magna, a paradisal world with jungles, oceans, plains, deserts, etc., but the Core War resulted in the destruction of said planet, which was split into Bara Magna, the jungle moon Bota Magna, and the endless ocean moon Aqua Magna (which turns out to have been where the first eight years of BIONICLE had been set on).
Video Games
- The "Under the Burning Suns" campaign in Battle for Wesnoth takes place in the distant future of the main setting of the game, centuries after Mages raised a second sun into the sky. Funnily enough, there's a solid gameplay reason for that: Lawful creatures (including mages) are stronger during the day. One way or another, having two suns led to the whole planet going desert. (The campaign features "Desert Elves".)
- Pandora in Borderlands invokes very Mad-Max like look-and-feel thank to be mostly desert and having a lot of remnants of mining equipment and towns in various states of decay and numerous garbage dumps. The lore for the planet states that it has orbit with high eccentricity, making climate hot and dry at short 'summer' and chilling cold at longer 'winter' causing most local species to hibernate at local winter. Since Borderlands 2 is set several years later (likely at local 'autumn'), it features much more diverse landscape, though there are still no large trees and vegetation is scarce even at more hospitable areas.
- The world of Heaven's Vault consists of "moons" (actually small asteroids with Eatrh-like gravity and atmoshpere) connected by a network of "rivers" (water flowing between the moons). Most of the moons are mostly or completely dry, with a few notable exceptions. This makes water a valuable resource.
- It's quite literally All There in the Manual, or at least it was until Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak came along in 2016, but the early history of the protagonist race from Homeworld had elements of this. Most of the people live at the temperate poles and the deserts that make up most of the planet are almost entirely unexplored.
- In Journey (2012), a robed figure is born in a desert where your ancestors' civilization existed. While cloth fragments are still around, not as much technology functions well and the buildings have deteriorated since the war machines' conflict against the White Robes. A exception to this is the snowy mountain, its peak split by a crevice.
- Motavia in Phantasy Star IV. It's naturally a desert planet, but in between Phantasy Star and Phantasy Star II, it was fully terraformed into a Ghibli Hills world that borders on Crystal Spires and Togas. However, Climatrol was destroyed in II, and since then, the world has been slowly desertifying and monsters have been taking over the wilds, with only the Hunter's Guild to fight them back. Thus, this crosses over with the Burned-Out Earth variant. Obviously, it was a desert planet in the original Phantasy Star, but it was far less "punk" back then.
- Pokémon:
- The protagonist of Pokémon Colosseum is not a plucky 10-year-old, but an ex-Pokémon thief who rescues the female protagonist, who looks like a cheap, under-age hooker in the Japanese version
◊. Together, they fight their way through the badlands of Orre, driving a rusty hover-cycle with an engine presumably stolen from a Top Fuel dragster. Reinforced by the near-total lack of Pokémon (read: organic life) in the desert areas. The only real exceptions are Agate Village (a lovely green village built high in the mountains) and Phenac City, a veritable oasis city whose mayor is secretly the Big Bad.
- The sequel game Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness takes place in the same region, but there are a few places where life has begun to find a way, and wild Pokémon have begun to appear. Strange, since Orre is not a post-apocalypse locale that has something to recover from, but merely in the Pokémon world equivalent of an actual desert in the southwestern United States.
- The protagonist of Pokémon Colosseum is not a plucky 10-year-old, but an ex-Pokémon thief who rescues the female protagonist, who looks like a cheap, under-age hooker in the Japanese version
- Sands of Destruction downplays the "punk" part in favor of Science Fantasy, but certain aspects take on a distinctly punk aesthetic — see, for example, the stern of Agan's Cool Ship The Sea Gale.
- Mar Sara and a few other desert worlds from StarCraft.
- Many of the Wild ARMs games have elements of this, as did the anime, with Wild ARMs 3 being the straightest example (the others all have prominent oceans and forests). Like Journey, crosses over with the Burned-Out Earth, though, since Filgaia as a planet is slowly dying.
Webcomics
- In Homestuck, the Land of Sand and Zephyr, and Earth c. 2422 (in the beta timeline, anyway).
Burned-out Earth Examples
Anime & Manga
- Basara is a shoujo Manga about a prophesied savior getting killed so his twin sister takes over. All this happens in a near future Japan that had been turned into a desert.
- Desert Punk (1997): After an implied global nuclear catastrophe Japan has been reduced to a desert ("The Great Kanto Desert"), and the surviving humans seek out a meager living in the hot sands.
- Last three episodes of Excel♡Saga, though it was only one city. 26 doesn't count.
- Fist of the North Star seems to be about 25% Kenshiro wandering through sand.
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set about one thousand years after a nuclear war that has turned most of the world into a burned-out desert, with toxic-spewing fungus and giant insects spreading throughout. The few people living wage wars against each other for what little resources remain.
- Now and Then, Here and There is set in a far distant future Earth where the Sun has become a Red Giant and its increased proximity has reduced our planet into a desert world full of evil people who make the bandit freaks from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior look like saints.
- Ozuma is set on Earth in the future when abnormal activity on the sun devastates Earth's atmosphere and covers the entire planet in a sea of sand.
- Sand Land is about a desert wasteland where humans and demons coexist, although not peacefully.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Pre-Time Skip, everything is desert with giant freakin' robots and beastmen. Can't really say the same for post-Time Skip, though.
- Xabungle straddles both types and plays the trope for a surprising amount of humor, but really falls here due to it being Earth All Along.
Comic Books
- Jonah Hex: In a bizarre turn of events, Wild West gunslinger Jonah Hex finds that he had been transported to the 21st century in Hex, and he becomes somewhat of a post-apocalyptic warrior in a world ravaged by nuclear war. Radiation has rendered much of the available water undrinkable, making water a precious commodity, and giving the setting a very desert-like atmosphere.
- Some Judge Dredd stories set in the Cursed Earth have this feel.
- Just a Pilgrim is set on an Earth devastated by a solar flare, literally burned out. The few survivors scrape along the arid ocean bottoms, beset by various mutant monsters.
- Tank Girl is usually set in the Australian outback, and Tank Girl is definitely a punk.
Films — Animation
- 9, though it's not quite clear in the film whether the entire world is like this or if it's just the place where the dolls live.
Films — Live-Action
- The Book of Eli: Most of the action takes place in the desert, later revealed to be the devastated California Central Valley.
- A Boy and His Dog - Society on the surface world has been reduced to roving bands of scavengers prowling for food and sex. There is a civilization underground, but it's a bizarre, oligarchical, almost dystopian state.
- Much of Cherry 2000 takes place in the post-apocalyptic Nevada desert.
- Despite being set in the present day, Fair Game (1986) and The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) have elements of this trope, most notably cool cars, arid Badlands, sociopathic hoons in punk punk inspired clothing, and deserted settlements.
- The Movie of Kamen Rider Kabuto shows an alternate timeline where the close relations between Riders did not exist and the impact of the first meteor evaporated all of Earth's oceans. Seven years after the meteor hit Earth, ZECT pretends to use a passing comet to refill the Earth's oceans, while in fact they are pulling another meteor to crash on Earth, one large enough to wipeout all of humanity.
- Mad Max, set in the lawless wastelands of post-apocalyptic Australia, is perhaps the Trope Codifier for Desert Punk in western media. The franchise's slapdash hot rods, homemade punk armors and patched together towns would go on to influence countless films, video games and other pieces of media.
- Resident Evil: Extinction. While it is set in the Nevada/Utah desert, the opening explains the whole world is a desert. The world (somehow) got better in the sequels.
- Solarbabies is an odd (and commercially disastrous) attempt to blend Desert Punk with roller-skating, teen dystopia, and elements of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial of all things.
- Patrick Swayze film Steel Dawn, which is a New Old West story with swords in a post-apocalyptic world.
- Tank Girl - At least Australia is sand, but we're not sure if it's the rest of the world too.
- Terminator Salvation seems to have this as the setting outside of cities.
Literature
- The Atlantropa Articles takes place in a post-apocalyptic Europe in the 23rd century where Nazis rule and the Mediterranean Sea has dried up, creating a massive desert called "the Kiln".
- City of Bones (1995) takes place a thousand years after an Unspecified Apocalypse reduced the world to a desert waste. Humanity survives in a few "fringe cities" with an exploitative Fantastic Caste System, while the Waste is a Death World inhabited by bio-engineered "krismen" and cannibalistic Desert Bandits. A major plot thread involves discovering the origin of the Waste and its ramifications for the present day.
- Clark Ashton Smith wrote a series of stories set on Zothique, a burned-out supercontinent in Earth's distant and bleak future. The typical Zothique story combines the Cosmic Horror Story with swashbuckling Heroic Fantasy adventure.
- Cthulhu Armageddon is set in a post-apocalypse Earth where the Great Old Ones have destroyed humanity and everyone is reduced to living in Weird West small towns or tribes. The majority of the world is now barren wasteland and monsters roam the Earth. Even the stars are no longer the same.
- The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye: After one last Great War, the world's been turned into an endless desert, with scant handfuls of humanity eking out an existence amid the ruins of civilization. The world is ruled by an enigmatic race of mutants known as The Third.
Live-Action TV
- Black Knight is a 6-episode Korean series, showing on Netflix. After a massive meteor swarm hit and devastated the Earth, Korea was transformed into a polluted desert where refugees live on the surface in the old ruins while a high tech middle-class live in a surface compound that extends underground and the the wealthiest house themselves in an Arcology. Food and oxygen need to be transported so well-armed delivery men truck these vital supplies past bandits.
- Since it takes place in a near future Las Vegas surrounded by a desert wasteland (even more of one than now) Dominion (2014) qualifies.
Music
- The video for Tom Petty's "You Got Lucky" takes place in an After the End version, loosely implied to be after an alien invasion.
Roleplay
- The entire basis of the Play-by-Post game We Are In A Desert Punk.
Tabletop Games
- Deadlands is set in a very strange version of the wild west that qualifies as this with a bit of magic thrown in for kicks.
Video Games
- An unusual Sword and Sorcery take on this is Petroglyph Games's Conan Unconquered real-time strategy/base defense game. It's set in a mythical past so distant that Earth's geography is different. Taking place in a newly erected desert stronghold, the End Times are coming to the land. Fortunately, you have the legendary Conan the Barbarian on your side. Replace Desert Punk technology with supernatural monsters, sorcerous constructs and inventions and you get a fantasy Desert Punk game with the usual trimmings.
- The Fallout universe as a whole is designed around the popular conceptions of future technology and the effects of nuclear war that the American public had in the 1950s. Many aspects of it are intentionally unrealistic.
- Fallout 1; Justified in this case, as the game takes place in post-apocalyptic Southern California.
- Fallout 2; Justified in this case, as the game takes place in post-apocalyptic Northern California, Northwestern Nevada and Southern Oregon.
- Fallout: New Vegas; Justified in this case, as the game takes place in the post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert. The exception is Zion Valley which is lush with life, clean flowing water, and a rain cycle.
- Fallout 3; Justified in this case as, even though it's set in Washington D.C., it was hit hard by nuclear weapons (the White House is gone), burning it even worse than the rest of the country.
- Fallout 4; Mostly averted, since Boston was not hit as hard as the rest of the country. However, the southern areas are still dangerous, mainly due to the presence of the Gunners, mercenaries who in practice are little better than raiders, as well as bands of Super Mutants. There's also the Glowing Sea in the southwestern corner, a radioactive wasteland (even by Fallout standards) created by the only nuke to hit the Boston area, which is filled with various types of Demonic Spiders that occasionally wander into the Commonwealth.
- Donkey Crew's Last Oasis is an MMO survival game where the Earth's rotation is slowing to a near-stop turning much of the world into an uninhabitable burning zone. Humans survive by fleeing to cooler but still largely desert regions using Clock Punk "walkers" which are ramshackle wooden frames powered by pedal or wind. People being people, there's plenty of tribalism, violence and looting in this new Earth. Not to mention aggressive monkeys with sticks..
- LISA, being heavily inspired by Fist of the North Star, is pretty much solely this.
- Rage (2011) is set on Earth after an asteroid impact and the ensuing ecological disasters turned large areas of the planet into a wasteland. What remains of humanity has reverted to a New Old West society, with pockets of civilization trying to rebuild and roaming bandit gangs fighting for whatever they can steal from the old world. You're the ex-marine lone security guard for a group of frozen survivors fighting through the raiders and crazies to find a way to save your fellow survivors from the totalitarian Authority.
- Sands of Salzaar from Han Squirrel Studio, is Chinese indie game that's a desert fantasy set in a Wuxia world resembling the western areas of ancient China during the Silk Road days. The ruling dynasty had fallen from an uprising of an alliance of tribes grown too ambitious against an old, faltering king. Unfortunately the usurpation took place during a eclipse event known as the Day of the Black Sunwhich brought the arrival of the Ifrit. But even with political upheaval and a supernatural disaster, camel trade caravans must still routinely ply their trade and bandits (including possibly yourself) are still going to raid them.
Webcomics
- Bicycle Boy takes place in a vast, dry post-apocalyptic desert.
- One of the subplots of Homestuck involves four survivors of the ravaging of Skaia exiled on Earth, doing... something. That's a pretty good question, what were they doing there?
- Turns out their job is to both advise the players and restore life on Earth.
- Suihira judging by the Saharan Shipwrecks and mentions that "lower desert" used to be ocean floor.
- Weapon Brown: The world we know as the "modern" world ends, according to Weapon Brown, when "the Dolly Madison Corporation realizes that their artificial flavorings were a hair's breadth away from becoming lethal toxins". At the same time period that this discovery is made, Hostess is not that far away from putting them out of business. According to Weapon Brown in an internal monologue, this caused them to shift from making snack cakes to making chemical weapons. They later developed the highly dangerous Zinger Bombs, which left half of the hemisphere uninhabitable. The result is that most currency in the world of Weapon Brown is not money, but technology, particularly food and, more importantly, functioning batteries.
Western Animation
- Parodied in Ben 10: Omniverse with Mad Ben, an Alternate Universe Ben who lived in a post-apocalyptic desert and used his Omnitrix to become a powerful warlord.
- Parodied in Futurama. Turns out that's just what 3003 Los Angeles looks like normally.