4.12 avg rating — 20,912 ratings

4.12 avg rating — 13,791 ratings

4.09 avg rating — 19,106 ratings

3.93 avg rating — 45,122 ratings

4.24 avg rating — 21,732 ratings

3.61 avg rating — 445,250 ratings

"Sal and Dean's trip from Colorado to Mexico in Part IV, and descriptions of their desert journey. One example: "Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond." "...the strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert."
"

4.18 avg rating — 54,053 ratings

4.06 avg rating — 375,995 ratings

"Thompson and Acosta are sent to cover the annual MINT 400 desert race. The protagonists suffer drug-induced visions of anthropomorphic desert creatures.
"

3.92 avg rating — 78,778 ratings

"The bus FURTHER grinding through the Arizona desert. Kesey fleeing to the Mexican desert after being busted for possession: "This 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo."
"

4.18 avg rating — 12,222 ratings

"Frequent and eloquent descriptions of the North African desert and its dust. Sitna Damiana and the slaughter of the camp's camels. Narouz following the ancient caravan routes: "The smugglers roads which had been used for centuries by the caravans which plied between Algiers and Mecca -- the 'bountiful highways' which steered the fortunes of men through the wilderness of the desert... A highway of camel-tracks, deeply worn in some places into solid rock..."
"

4.08 avg rating — 29,055 ratings

4.07 avg rating — 861,540 ratings

3.90 avg rating — 1,002 ratings

"The title short story, "The Day It Rained Forever", set in the hot and parched desert, with relief through music"

4.17 avg rating — 224 ratings

4.02 avg rating — 1,925 ratings

3.54 avg rating — 3,928 ratings

4.23 avg rating — 55,400 ratings

"California's Muroc Air Base, later to be renamed Edwards Air Force Base, "...in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It waa full of huge dry lake beds... Other than sagebrush, the only vegetation was Joshua trees... In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie." Chapter 15 is titled "The High Desert". Also Holloman Air Force Base, "...in the deserts of New Mexico, about 80 miles north of El Paso and the Mexican border... ...part of the White Sands missle-range complex...", where Project Mercury's chimps were flight-trained."

3.86 avg rating — 1,068 ratings

"The category-relevant short story in this collection is "The Day It Rained Forever", set in the hot and parched desert, with relief through music"

3.71 avg rating — 14 ratings

3.66 avg rating — 4,061 ratings

3.66 avg rating — 34,392 ratings

"Much of Boyle's novel is set in the desert canyons a few miles out of Los Angeles and its suburbs. As an example, when Candido, a major character in the novel, gets a job clearing brush from one of the hillsides above one of the "rural" housing projects, he suffered "the seeds of all those incorrigible desert plants like needles, like fisherman's hooks stabbing through your clothes and into your flesh." When Candido and America made their illegal border
crossing in the desert near Tiajuana, America "ran, naked, her feet sliced by the rocks and the
stabbing talons of the desert plants." Also, there is an allusion to the Great Painted Desert in the chapter where Delaney Mossbacher hits Candido with
his car.
"

3.59 avg rating — 2,148 ratings

4.12 avg rating — 7,182 ratings

4.24 avg rating — 3,237 ratings

4.02 avg rating — 5,868 ratings

4.04 avg rating — 453,221 ratings

"The author, commenting on Australia/New Guinea: "...it's the smallest continent... the large fraction of it covered by desert capable of supporting few humans." More: "Nor could food production spring up spontaneously in deserts remote from sources of water for irrigation, such as central Australia and parts of the western United States." The author discusses at length natural barriers, including deserts, as factors that slowed or virtually prohibited the spread of food production strategies. He speaks of the "Central Asian desert" as one of these barriers, and another where "North American hunter-gatherers in California" were "separated by deserts from the Native American farmers of Arizona." The author writes that "the northern Mexican desert... separated advanced human societies of Mesoamerica from those of North America". Also, "...crop diffusion from Indonesia south to southwestern Australia was completely impossible..." due largely to the barrier posed by the Australian desert, "...and diffusion over the much shorter distance from Mexico to the U.S. Southwest and Southeast was slow, because the intervening areas were deserts hostile to agriculture." The author notes that the Sahara Desert posed the same barrier between North Africa and the southern part of that continent
"

4.15 avg rating — 758 ratings

4.44 avg rating — 1,374 ratings

4.08 avg rating — 6,408 ratings

3.89 avg rating — 1,143 ratings

"The Martian desert where Venturicorp. had its beginnings; the Gobi Desert hundreds of miles from Ulan Bator where Kevin, the lesser son of God, worked a miracle
"

4.23 avg rating — 216 ratings

"Crossing the Peruvian coastal desert by train, and by saddle horse on leaving the Amazon basin: "We broke out of the jungle and into the open. Before us stretched a brown sandy desert with giant cactus rising fifty feet toward the blazing sun. The temperature was 123 degrees. Our skins burned and windblown dust clogged our throats. We had no sooner started into the desert than we struck the edge of a locust plague, billions of three-inch red hoppers, and not a blade of the poorest desert grass was left... For two hours we rode through locusts."
"

3.80 avg rating — 196 ratings

"The Martian deserts, where Colonel Katterfelto "led his regiment across the wastes of the red planet to mop up any Martian survivors" of the Second Worlds war. Also: Katterfelto's Spiritual Labratory, built for the "construction of the Mechanical Messiah", in Wormcast, Arizona
"

4.33 avg rating — 79,772 ratings

"At the book's climax the hiver, a sort of bodiless parasite which
has been pursuing Tiffany Aching throughout the book, is led by
Tiffany to the land of the dead: a black sand desert which must be crossed for any entity to discover their ultimate fate. To Tiffany, "The sand felt gritty and crunched underfoot when she walked over it, as she expected, but when it was kicked up, it fell back as slowly as thistledown... Tiffany looked around at the endless sand... She sat down, just for a moment, and picked up a handful of the sand. It rose above her head, twisting like smoke, reflecting the starlight, then settled back as if it had all the time in the world... There were her footprints in the sand, but they went only a few feet and, anyway, were slowly disappearing. There was nothing around her but dead desert, forever."
"

4.18 avg rating — 2,916 ratings

4.18 avg rating — 2,497 ratings

4.09 avg rating — 3,806 ratings

4.17 avg rating — 3,482 ratings

3.60 avg rating — 1,114 ratings

"What Kosinski calls "...the splendor of the Anza Borrego Desert, with its oases of fan palms and rugged canyons and steep ravines...": "Often at dawn, when the Shoshones were still asleep in the small house, he would drive to one of the dry washes of the Anza Borrego Desert. He would get out of the Jeep and walk into the empty reaches of stone and scrub that opened before him like a dungeon of heat and sand. In the distance the rising mist revealed the lofty pinnacles of scraggy mountains, a reddish streak against the sky's blue, and below, like dry bones stripped of flesh, the hillocks of the Borrego Badlands. Here, where no sound broke the quiet, he would stand and imagine that one day the well of his music might become as dry and as soundless as this desert."
"

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 3,760 ratings

"In addition to multiple references to Edward Abbey, one of the best-known writers of desert environmentalism, there are a number of more direct desert references, eg: "In a week they'd be staging a protest in the Arizona desert against yet another power plant." Tierwater's thoughts about the Arizona Phantom: "The Phantom was a case in point. He'd appeared along the Arizona/New Mexico border in the early seventies, an anonymous avenger who took on Peabody Coal and its federal allies in the fight over the Four Corners power stations and the mine planned for Black Mesa... Burn coal and light up L.A. so the megalopolis can creep even
farther into the desert..." Tierwater's experiences just
outside of L.A.: "Here he could breathe. Here were the smells of sage and sun-baked dirt strewn with the chaff and seeds of the plants that sprang from it, desert lives and desert deaths." And Tierwater's correctional time spent at "the state prison at Calpurnia, a big stark factory of a place in the blasted scrubby hills of the Mohave Desert."
"

4.13 avg rating — 6,658 ratings

"The Zappa family moved to Lancaster, California in the Mojave Desert when Frank was a teenager, so that Frank's father
could take a job at Edwards Air Force Base. In a section of the book titled "Deserts" Frank reminesces about a favorite composer: " < Edgard > Varese told me that he was working on
a new piece called 'Deserts', which thrilled me since Lancaster, California was in the desert. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a 'song about your hometown' (so to speak), you can get pretty excited." And later: "When I was in high school in Lancaster, I formed my first band, the Black Outs... This was the only R&B band in the entire Mojave Desert at that time." And again: "You could always tell if a guy was a 'desert rat' by the windshield on his car. The wind was a constant factor, and so were the microscopic particles of sand it carried, capable of pitting a windshield till you couldn't see out of it anymore..."
"

4.30 avg rating — 10,414 ratings

"Kranz's assignment to Holloman Air Force Base, located in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin within the Chihuahuan Desert, near White Sands: "The vast uninhabited area provided the remote location needed to test the early developments in rocketry and aircraft missile systems... High speed sleds shrieked across the desert..." Kranz's fighter pilot training at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base, located in the Mojave Desert, and his aerial description of the north end of Frenchman's Flat: "From the helicopter, I was amazed at the results of the nuclear tests that had pockmarked the desert as far as the eye could see, the craters a myriad of desert colors, the rocks and boulders arrayed from the blast point." Kranz's colleague, Jack Ernst, seeking volunteers for "the Officer's Club annual rattlesnake roundup. Prowling through the lava beds, Jack had collected several over six feet long. He was not easily disturbed by the critters of the desert." And more
"

3.87 avg rating — 2,699 ratings

"Plot settings in Egypt, Tangier, and Marrakesh; the "ancient yellow landscape" of Arabia; the "road through cactus" on the outskirts of a Mexican City; the smell of "concentrated urine of little fennec foxes in desert sand..."; the "wispy skittish space horse by a desert fort from BEAU GESTE; Kim and the Innkeeper's Son "walking silently into the desert"; and the journey employing the "Sand Bug" conveyance, over "precipitous mountain roads, little more than trails in some places, cut into red sandstone" in the Red Lands, roads ending in "scrub and cactus".
"

4.20 avg rating — 1,707 ratings

"Category-Relevant Stories include: "Big Game", eg. "the jaguar shot across the desert like a beam of light"; "The Human Fly", eg. Zoltan axle-riding the 18-wheeler across "the scorching strip between Tucson and Gila Bend"; "The New Moon Party", eg. the acknowledgment of rain in the Atacama ; and "Filthy With Things", eg. the two identical posters of the Bonneville Salt flats in the Susan Certaine Co-Dependent Hostel, and Mr. Laxner's musings on the Venusian deserts
"

3.79 avg rating — 7,235 ratings

"Mountain man Jedediah Smith, crossing "the hundreds of miles of the Mojave desert" in 1827: "His reputation stems from this barely believable epic: With Indians slaughtering his men, with water running out in the scorching heat of cactus country..." Overloaded wagons, breaking down and abandoned in Death Valley during the California Gold Rush; the open deserts of the Basin and Range Province; Winslow, Arizona and the desert meteor crater; the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and the great Nevada desert south of Winnemucca and Elko. Lieutenant George Wheeler, mapping the American West in 1872: "He had mapped 327,000 square miles -- with the challenge of mapping Death Valley chief among his cartographic successes." California's Carizzo Plain: "The countryside south of Parkfield rapidly becomes very much drier, sandier, and unpopulated. Only eight inches of rain fall each year on the Carizzo Plain -- a high, hot place of salt flats and soda lakes..."
"

3.98 avg rating — 23,389 ratings

"Most of the action in this novel is set in Tabula Ra$a, the "brand-new city in the desert." A BLINK rumor held that the key to Arthur Livingston's vault was hidden outside the city, in a "cave out in the desert". Of import to the plot, there's the "olive green truck... parked outside of town, in the desert", that served as the launching platform for the "remote control heavy ordinance drone" that targeted Tabula Ra$a's hospital
"

4.18 avg rating — 11,372 ratings

"The high desert plateau in another part of the multiverse where the Sleeper awaits to be wakened
"

4.11 avg rating — 2,327 ratings

"The desert plays a small but important role in Stross' novel. For example, Mary "...whisked her small charge along a darkened passageway with two bends in it that formed a light trap, then out into a nighttime desert wonderland with fake sand dunes ... The horizon was
dominated by the silhouettes of distant palm trees."
"

4.14 avg rating — 10,051 ratings

"One category-relevant tale in this short story collection is R.A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses", which begins with "Two Englishmen... rolling in a terrain buggy over the Thar Desert. It was bleak, red country, more rock than sand. It looked as though the top had been stripped off it and the naked underland left uncovered. They heard thunder and it puzzled them.... It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur. What would this rainless North India desert have to thunder with ?" When it later began to rain, the story's narrator notes that "rain in the desert is always like a bonus."
"

3.64 avg rating — 20,315 ratings

"Much of the action of this book takes place with the characters Bob Wilton and Lyn Cassady in the Iraqi desert. And more: for example, the theme tune to Barney the Dinosaur is played repeatedly and at volume to Iraqi detainees in a shipping container in the desert
"

3.93 avg rating — 1,363 ratings

"The only Category-Relevant story in this collection is "The Human Fly", where Zoltan is axle-riding the 18-wheeler across "the scorching strip between Tucson and Gila Bend"
"

3.76 avg rating — 5,241 ratings

"There is much about deserts in this book titled for an ocean: The Portuguese navigator Gil Eannes, whose ship was "blown by the gusts of a harmattan wind onto the African desert coast some thirty miles south of Bojador, and picked a sample of the woody desert plant known as St. Mary's flower or the rose of Jericho to bring back as proof" that he had doubled Cape Bojador. More: "...the ferocity of the harmattan wind incidental to the study of oasis formation in the Sahara." James Benell's study of the average speed of Saharan camels. The author's view of Africa from Tarifa: "...it was all there, large and looming and pink with Moroccan desert dust." The discussion of murex snails, source of "The Kingdom of Morocco has on its most widely used currency bill neither a camel nor a minaret nor a Touareg in desert blue, but the representation of the shell of a very large snail." The desert Berbers; desert caravans; "sour and brackish water" from desert wells; and more
"

4.03 avg rating — 8,346 ratings

""The desert torched. Heat rays jumped." Succinct descriptions of desert heat abound, as much of the action in Elloy's novel takes place in and around the desert city of Las Vegas -- its bars, hotels, casinos: Bodies dumped in the desert outside the city; Sirhan Sirhan at the Desert Dawn Hotel; Morris Dalitz' Desert Inn Hotel Casino; Howard Hughes, wanting to buy Las Vegas and its entire casino industry because, as he told Ward Littell, "The desert air kills germs."
"

3.77 avg rating — 714 ratings

""The New Mexico desert in July, 1945 provided the setting for the birth of the atomic spaceship concept. The scientists of the Manhattan Project gathered to witness the Trinity nuclear test... the massive fireball rose above the White Sands Proving Ground..."; The Operation Cue bomb test: "Research carried out in 1955 at Yucca Flat, 80 miles north-west of Las Vegas in the Nevada desert, added a dose of grim reality to the knowledge about atomic survival... Out in the middle of the desert, at a cost of over $1,000,000, researchers built a faux community consisting of ten fully furnished homes that featured amenities such as basements, medicine cabinets, and pantries and refrigerators stocked with food... On 5 May a 35-kiloton bomb blasted Survival City. Seven of the ten homes survived..."; Underground nuclear detonations in the summer of 1957 at the Nevada Test Site; Deceleration testing by rocket-sled at Holloman Air Force Base in the New Mexican desert in 1947
"

3.86 avg rating — 1,066 ratings

"Essential to the plot, part of a murder investigation is held on the Festers' ranch in the Mexican desert; and Hillory Fester, a suspect in that murder, explores the desert next to her ranch
"

3.75 avg rating — 8,083 ratings

"Kerouac's collection of stories and sketches, some autobiographical, some fiction -- some tell of his desert travels in Morocco and Mexico, of time spent in Tangiers and in Mexico City. An example: at "the midway point of the trip from the Mexican border at Nogales Arizona", Kerouac met Enrique and Gerardo "while the passengers were stretching their legs at desert huts in the Sonora desert... "We immediately started blasting among the cacti in the back of the desert waystations, squatting there in the hot sun laughing..."
"

3.56 avg rating — 5,694 ratings

"Much of this novel is set in a vast post-nuclear-apocalypse desert that stretches much of the way between Los Angeles and Boston. The novel's anti-hero, Hell Tanner, has to cross this desert of large sand dunes, strange desert plants, giant mutant Gila monsters and scorpions. A passage: "he sun rose up like molten silver to his right, and a third of the sky grew amber and was laced with fine lines like cobwebs. The desert was topaz beneath it, and the brown curtain of dust that hung continuously at his back, pierced only by the eight shafts of the other cars' lights, took on a pinkish tone as the sun grew a bright red corona and the shadows fled into the west. He dimmed his lights as he passed an orange cactus shaped like a toadstool and perhaps fifty feet in diameter."
"

3.37 avg rating — 78 ratings

"The relevant excerpt is "Across the Plains in the Donner Party", per Donner party survivor Virginia Reed Murphy: The Reed wagon with a mirror left "standing like a monument in the Salt Lake desert"; the cookstove cached there. The "drive though the desert by the shore of the lake": "This desert had been represented to us as only forty miles wide but we found it nearer eighty. It was a dreary, desolate, alkali waste; not a living thing could be seen; it seemed as though the hand of death had been laid upon the country. We started in the evening, traveled all that night, and the following day and night -- two nights and one day of suffering from thirst and heat by day and piercing cold by night. When the third night fell... we saw the barren waste stretching away apparently as boundless as when we started..."
"

3.91 avg rating — 388,333 ratings

3.44 avg rating — 145 ratings

4.08 avg rating — 1,291 ratings

"The interior desert of Australia
"

3.95 avg rating — 4,374 ratings

"Fred's sojourn to the Australian desert.to study ancient cliff carvings; Fred tortured there by Zeemeister and Buckler while looking for a doorway in the sand
"

3.92 avg rating — 3,518,957 ratings

4.25 avg rating — 4 ratings

"Contains vignettes of all the desert-dwelling mammal, bird, and reptile species found in North America, with descriptions of their habitats
"

3.79 avg rating — 27,629 ratings

"Calliope, a central character and Sam's love interest in Moore's novel, tells Sam: "I used to live with a sculptor in Sedona, Arizona, who built it < a car > for midnight drives in the desert." At another time, she stated that “Indians used to change their names as they grew up and their personalities changed or when they did certain things, like Walks Across the Desert and stuff like that.” The narrator, describing Sam's trip to Las Vegas: "The only distractions from the noise of his own mind were desert-dried roadkills, thrown retreads, and road signs reflecting desolation." The narrator again: "Sam saw the glow from Las Vegas rising over the desert from thirty miles out." And again, re Calliope's experience in Las Vegas: "Litter danced in dust devils of desert wind that had grown cold in the night." And more
"

3.93 avg rating — 122 ratings

3.23 avg rating — 13 ratings

3.77 avg rating — 159 ratings

"The life of Don C. Talayesva, born in Oraibi, Arizona, in 1890
"

4.23 avg rating — 66 ratings

4.36 avg rating — 124 ratings

3.67 avg rating — 3 ratings

"There is much about the Sahara and the deserts and sub-desert scrub of North Africa in this chronicle of the expeditions of Mungo Park. "The barren plains and dunes of the Sahara" abut the Niger River's left bank on that river's great northern bend. "After the inland delta... the Niger flows slowly on into the semi-desert, lucky to see even five inches of rain in a year." The Niger is separated from Timbuctu by "seven miles of the constantly-deposited desert sand." The trans-Sahara trade from the 13th century forward is discussed, as are its trade routes and stopovers, including "the oasis of Touat, halfway between Algiers and Timbuctu." The trans-Sahara journey of Simon Lucas; Beaufoy's collation of data that increased what was "known of Bornu and the other states on the southern edges of the Sahara"; The peoples of the desert -- the Berber, the Tuareg, the Moors, and their depredations into the sub-Sahara are a central theme of the book. And much more
"

3.78 avg rating — 37 ratings

"The desert plays a major role in one of the Freak Brothers
adventures in this collection. Phineas, attempting to fly to Colombia, gets on the wrong plane and finds himsel landing in Mecca in a six-cartoon-panel series. A bit later, Phineas purchases Freewheelin' Franklin and Fat Freddy in the Doowaddhi slave market, and takes them to his desert tent in a 6-panel series, one panel of which shows several camels in the background. While so tented,
Phineas regales his two brothers with the story of his rise to riches in Mecca. After the tale-telling is over, the three Freak Brothers are caught in a desert sandstorm in a long 26-panel series. After the sandstorm, Phineas broadcasts the followers of his newly-created cult of
Fundaligionism from somewhere deep within the Sahara Desert.
"

3.77 avg rating — 646 ratings

"This book has many references to the desert, the desert Khans, and the desert empire of the Mohammadans. One exmaple: "The climate is very intemperate, as in the middle of summer there arc terrible storms of thunder and lightning by which many people are killed, and even then there are great falls of snow and such tempests of cold winds blow that sometimes people can hardly sit on horseback. In one of these we had to throw ourselves down on the ground and could not see through the prodigious dust. There are often showers of hail, and sudden, intolerable heats followed by extreme cold. This is the Gobi desert, A,D. 1162, the Year of the Swine in the Calendar of the Twelve Beasts." Another example: Genghis Khan "must have made a wide circle through the Red Sands desert, because he appeared out of the barrens, marching swiftly on Bokhara from the west."
"

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings

4.40 avg rating — 10 ratings

3.70 avg rating — 100 ratings

"The setting of the play is the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q, located “at a lonely crossroads in the eastern Arizona desert.”
"

3.67 avg rating — 3,763 ratings

"The entire 64th Chorus: "I want to go live in the desert..." The Three Wise Men meeting in the desert in the 68th Chorus. The 129th Chorus: "On a mission to conquer the desert..."
"

3.26 avg rating — 34 ratings

4.08 avg rating — 533 ratings

"The Hollisters are stranded in the desert when the evil Mesquite Mike chases off their horses
"