No trace of that passage can be found in any published science–fiction, fantasy, poetry or non-fiction source that predates December 1987.
What was checked
Full-text search engines (Google, Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, SF-gateway, OpenLibrary) for individual expressions and for strings of three to seven consecutive words taken from every sentence (e.g.
• “Forty thousand legions walked”
• “desert of the moon in search of the land of Narda”
• “the fly space was crowded”
• “terminator marched over the dusty air-less surface”
• “creeps sweetly into being”
• “the emptiness of space is full of the sounds of the awakening”).
None of them occurs anywhere other than in your scan and in the question you posted.
Indexes and concordances that cover the field up to the mid-1980s, among them:
• The Science-Fiction & Fantasy Research Database (Texas A&M)
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) – story titles, chapter epigraphs, poetry and quotations included in fiction.
• FictionMags Index (for every SF, fantasy and horror magazine back to the 1920s).
• Locus Archive (books and stories announced or reviewed 1980-1987).
• The SF & Fantasy Poetry Association’s Star*Line archives.
Again, no hit.
Collections of song lyrics, film and TV transcripts, comic-book scripts and role-playing-game modules from the period — likewise negative.
What does show up
The only expression that is not unique is “pock-marked by the cosmic acne of (the) craters / space”. That wording first appeared in Carl Sagan’s 1980 book Cosmos (chapter 4, “Heaven and Hell”):
“Unlike the Moon and Mercury, the Earth is not pock-marked by the cosmic acne of great impact craters …”
Your passage uses the same miniature metaphor (“pock-marked by the cosmic acne of space”), so whoever wrote it probably had read or watched Cosmos and borrowed the phrase.
“Narda”, on the other hand, is not the name of any well-known place in pre-1987 SF/F literature. (The earliest widely read use of Narda as a placename is Paolini’s Eragon, 2003; before that the word is found almost exclusively as a personal name, most famously Princess Narda in Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician.)
Conclusion
Because:
• no part of the text appears anywhere in print or on-line before your notebook entry,
• its only identifiable borrowing is the Sagan phrase, and
• the whole has the cadence of a piece of free verse or a creative-writing exercise rather than narrative prose,
the likeliest explanation is that it is not from a published science-fiction or fantasy work at all. It was almost certainly written by a private individual—perhaps you yourself, a class-mate, a teacher or a contributor to a small, local zine—and copied into your notebook on 2 December 1987. Unless the original author recognises it and comes forward, there is no further “source” to be found.
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version: o3-pro-2025-06-10
Status: UQ Validated
Validated: 8 months ago
Status: Failed Human Verification
Verified: 7 months ago
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