In 2024, the Cozzzmonautica caravan carries us, gently sways us and invites us to dream together as we journey along the Silk Roads, stretching from the past into the future.
Our special guests this year will guide us through the desert of the present, helping us navigate more confidently among the dunes of both planetary and extra-planetary landscapes.
The time has come to reconsider our relationship with the most inhospitable and arid lands of the Earth, bearing in mind that deserts are the closest we get to the desolate worlds of the solar system!
„science fiction (SF) literature, described by Lem as a «marriage of Einstein and Scheherazade»”.
~Lem’s Theory of Science Fiction: Structures and Sociology of the Genre”, Lech Keller (2003)
“ – Have you seen this cactus before?
– No, replied Ioana, gazing curiously at the prickly cylinder, as tall as a person, with small, almost transparent flower cups vibrating in the air among its long spines, arranged in perfect symmetry.
– It was probably planted today. Either way, it’s a very rare species; I can’t recall ever seeing anything like it.”
~ CPSF 396, Year XVII, May 15, 1971, from the short story by Marcel Luca And If Somewhere in the Universe Cacti Grow.
What if we started regarding Stanislaw Lem not just as a celebrated writer of SF but as a theoretician of SFF—a philosopher in disguise whose role we are only belatedly rediscovering? The theoretical oeuvre of Lem remained partially ignored, being written in a Slavic language (Polish) and hidden behind the Iron Curtain.
I have taken the above quote from the study by the Australian scholar Lech Keller from 1997, which tries to reinstate Lem in his role as a theoretician of SF. If we try to analyze the above sentence through a non-binary gender-critical lens, it will appear at first glance faulty and stereotypical. Such a marriage is at first sight an odd one: a wedding between a semi-legendary feminine storyteller that we all have grown up with and one of the most celebrated scientists who has radically changed and transformed our worldview, marking the history of scientific thought. We could even say that this slightly bizarre and ironic bond becomes an even greater challenge now that the conflicts and genocidal warfare in the Middle East cannot be ignored.
The history of speculative philosophy as a non-Eurocentric history
What if the history of thought experiments (Gedankenexperimente) that one typically encounters during scientific revolutions and that does include bicycles running at the speed of light and hypothetical sentient beings, molecular ‘demons’ that appear to contradict the second law of thermodynamics do have something in common with the One Thousand and One nights?
Maybe such supposition does not necessitate a big leap of imagination. What do we discover when we intersect modern speculative exercises and fabulations of science with storytelling that hails from the larger east of Persian, Indian, Chinese and Arab civilizational flourishing? Shortly put, can we say that Lem brings forth a welcome ‘promiscuity’ and kinship that de-centers modern cosmology and fundamental physics by allowing it to meet refined fabulations produced and circulated along the Silk Roads, on both water or land? Modern astronomy carries this Arab and Indian inheritance through names like Betelgeuse, Altair, Deneb and Rigel or terms like “azimuth” and “nadir” or Hindu-Arabic numeral system.
The Desert as Incubator
Deserts are also incubators for unusual encounters and extraordinary experiences. Here is an interesting transhistorical convergence – these desolate, arid places where ascetics and anchorites used to retreat from the ‘Earthly’ world brought them closer to the discipline required for the training of present-day astronauts and cosmonauts.
To be closer to Mars, you put some distance between you and the cities and civilization that grew out of them. At the same time deserts should not be romanticized, since current climate refugees and economic migrants are constantly facing some of the harshest areas and most unfriendly border zones, a horrific passage made under inhuman conditions in the search of a welcome oasis and a better life.
In an age of climate emergency, the warmest day on record for the entire planet and the highest global average temperature ever recorded are being broken every year. Each of the past 12 months has ranked as the warmest on record in year-on-year comparisons, according to the EU’s climate change monitoring service.
From Dune to Kin-Dza-Dza!, to Mad Max and Animalia (directed by Sofia Alaoui), the desert has remained an incubator for experiments that dare to imagine future societies and exo-planetary worlds inspired by our apocalyptic present. The desert also happens to offer perfect conditions for observing the farthest reaches of the universe. It’s no coincidence that astronomical observatories such as ALMA and Paranal have been built in the Atacama.
This edition of Cozzzmonautica reconsiders our relationship with the most inhospitable and arid territories of Earth, seeking out a kinship between desert planets and Terra — environments that connect us to the Empty Quarters of the Solar System.
Desertification and techno-modernity
Desertification has been described as the “greatest environmental challenge of our time.” Especially in Romania, the areas of the Oltenia Plain, Bărăgan Plain, and Banat Plain are experiencing advancing desertification, with land degradation, erratic rainfall patterns, erosion from agro-industry, and unsustainable water usage all playing a role.
The Capitalocene is rapidly xenoforming the Blue Marble, putting the only home we have in the entire solar system under threat from rapid desertification and devastating fires. It is no mystery anymore that due to the dependence of capitalist techno-modernity on non-renewable fossil fuels, large areas risk becoming depopulated wastelands. Meanwhile, initiatives by “space billionaires” searching for an escape from Earth’s collapsing ecosystems offer false hope for a small group of privileged people. Yet such “solutionisms” ignore the fact that even the most inhospitable earthly habitats, like deserts, are far more benign and preferable than the extreme conditions found in every other corner of the solar system or interstellar space.
Oases in the midst of cosmic deserts
Cozzzmonautica takes at face value the humorous sketch written by the Timișoara-born SF writer Marcel Luca in 1971, when he was working as a chemist at the Laboratory of Pedology and Agrochemistry, reconsidering it from a speculative perspective. What if the “real” aliens are those life forms that live in deserts or dry climates, more akin to succulents that evolved in environments where water is a rarity? These plants have evolved ingenious ways to thrive in biogeographic areas such as the Atacama, Namib, Taklamakan, Gobi, Sonoran, Ar-Rub’ al-Khali, or Sahara under the harshest conditions.
The result of this parallel evolution produces all sorts of alternative cacti, species only distantly related, that have found similar ways to cope with extreme conditions, living on various continents that have been geologically separated from each other for long periods of time. Jaime Green’s book The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos speculates about such close-to-home “aliens,” non-human life forms that seem unearthly and strange when measured against most of the life forms we are familiar with.
So, is it an accident that teams of astronauts and taikonauts are already training today for future space missions in the desert? Let us reconsider the role of such cosmic oases by reimagining the whole Earth as a welcoming caravanserai in the middle of immense cosmic wastelands.
– Ștefan Tiron
Cozzzmonautica is an alternative educational program dedicated to lovers of outer space, universe exploration and xenobiology, science fiction and speculative fiction.