The last chapter ended with Max still out there. The Road Warrior endured, even with the ends of civilisation and its fitful restarts, to nurture life. The victory celebrations of the liberated in Mad Max: Fury Road, however, seemed partial, for what would happen once the water ran out? With Max nodding and leaving, there remains the possibility for further narration in Mad Max 5 of the violence, crashes, and becomings of Max's life in the dry expanses of the desert.

Deserts have been a feature of this book's journey of living in technical legality: the deserts of Arrakis, the empty space of Battlestar Galactica, the materiality of matter in time of the Doctor's universe and the iconic Australian outback of Mad Max 2. Even the hyper-life of the renovated South American rainforests of Xenogenesis was a desert, a place of danger and death for Butler's Oankali-saved urbanised humans. These textual and screened deserts were representative of another desert. The triumph of technology in the modern West is often associated with desert imagery. There are concerns with emptiness, uniformity, alien hostility to humanity, a dry space of non-life. This book, taking an alternative perspective, goes to the desert. Its charting of hope is predicated on the harsh reality that the desert of the totality of technology needs to be seen as home for us: the monsters that have inherited the West.

Deserts, as seen in Dune and Mad Max, are not empty, uniform, and hostile to humanity, dry spaces of non-life. Herbert's imaging of Dune, notwithstanding criticisms that can be made of the depth of his ecological engagement, was based on his seeing in the desert networks of becoming: interconnections between biotic, abiotic, and cultural systems. There is life in deserts, and deserts live. The sands of Arrakis ebb and flow over the millennia of the Dune cycle, yet they endure. Deserts can be home, but to be place and not space requires technical intervention. From Herbert's Freman, to the spaceship-borne technological society of Battlestar Galactica, to the re-settlers of the Butler's rehabilitated Earth, to the Doctor's universe traversing blue box, to the survivors of Mad Max, life continues, changes, becomes in the desert, through machines, skills, and techniques.