Comments on: Science fiction on ice

Question: Science fiction on ice

aebaxter — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:44:36 -0800

I need recommendations for excellent science fiction books, movies, short stories (or anything, really) centered around life, scientific exploration, and/or research in the arctic, antarctica, or similar fictional extreme cold climates.

Think the X-Files episode "Ice," or Firefly in a really really cold climate (I can't think of any literary examples). I realize there are many documentaries out there centered around this subject, but I'm specifically looking for science fiction.

By: phearlez

phearlez — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:51:23 -0800

The Thing.

By: zadcat

zadcat — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:02:43 -0800

Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

By: crush-onastick

crush-onastick — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:06:49 -0800

le guin's left hand of darkness is about a world called winter (well, really, it's about dualism and gender roles and science fiction as metaphor for the human condition, but it's set on a very cold planet).

By: xmutex

xmutex — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:09:56 -0800

Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a very strange tale that takes its narrator down into Antarctica.

By: RakDaddy

RakDaddy — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:10:34 -0800

Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica .

By: Capn

Capn — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:12:33 -0800

Did you say extreme cold?

By: judybxxx

judybxxx — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:16:55 -0800

I loved this as a teenager - I think it's a classic. I've got to run, so don't know if it's in libraries.

Iceworld by Hal Clement, First Published in 1953
Genre(s): SF

From the Publisher
Planet of Death.

The world was cold. The crew of the spaceship could feel the chill in their bones even as they hung in orbit, fifty planetary diameters away.

It was a frightening prospect, for even the rays from this system's sun were weak, lifeless; it seemed impossible that such a bleak and icy globe could ever have produced intelligent life... or so it seemed to a race that breathed gaseous sulfur and drank molten copper chloride.

For the world of ice was Earth!

Out of print

By: wannalol

wannalol — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:22:50 -0800

The Trudeau Vector.

Elements of Lucifer by Michael Cordy take place in a research base in a cold climate.

There is this movie Deep Freeze but it gets terrible reviews e.g. "Don`t Defrost This Turkey".

By: dgeiser13

dgeiser13 — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:23:13 -0800

There's the Icerigger series of books by Alan Dean Foster composed of Icerigger (1974), Mission to Moulokin (1979) and The Deluge Drivers (1987).

By: skrike

skrike — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:29:44 -0800

not exactly SciFi but maybe the Deception Point?

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:41:26 -0800

Niven's short "Wait It Out". Brrr.

By: poweredbybeard

poweredbybeard — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:46:47 -0800

i second left hand of darkness, not only because it is what you are looking for (not necessarily at the beginning), but because it is a hauntingly beautiful piece of fiction.

By: greatgefilte

greatgefilte — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:54:04 -0800

Well, there's always the Mars trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Mars can be a pretty cold place, I hear.

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:14:06 -0800

Second Hal Clement's Iceworld. Good science.

By: signal

signal — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:16:41 -0800

Second Antarctica, well though out, involved; enthusiastically third Left Hand of Darkness, gorgeous ideas and writing.

By: spicynuts

spicynuts — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:19:58 -0800

What about White Fang and the other Jack London books? Alaska is cold.

By: meehawl

meehawl — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:20:23 -0800

Brian Aldiss's Helliconia 1980s trilogy is notable. It's a trilogy where the actually makes plot sense rather than satisfying some vague publishing/marketing shelf space dictate (although I'm sure that played a part).

Helliconia is a planet with a complex and very long orbit. It spends a great deal of time almost completely frozen in an ice age. Then it spends several thousand years warming. There are two dominant species, both humanoid, but one very similar to homo sapiens (likes it warm), and one more like a kind of shaggy ape. Both species wax and wane according to the climate cycle, and the interaction between both species is mediated by a rather elaborate retrovirus that has evolved to periodically purge the populations and alter their dominant genotype to adapt them to the conditions. It's a kind of repetitive, punctuated, circular evolution. It's informed throughout by Aldiss' magnificent skepticism about "progress". The trilogy cycle is Spring-Summer-Winter. It plays with the notions of heroic fantasy, much the same way as, say, M John Harrison's Virconium.

Vernor Vinge used the same idea of a long-term cold/hot planetary orbit to great effect, as well, in his A Deepness in the Sky.

By: squidlarkin

squidlarkin — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:35:48 -0800

Larry Niven's short story Wait It Out takes place on Pluto.

By: Sonny Jim

Sonny Jim — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:52:28 -0800

Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. (Obvious, though maybe marginal as far as s/f goes. I mean, it's fiction and it's got science in it...)

Craig Harrison's Days of Starlight (1988), on the other hand, is first-rate science fiction set in Antarctica, but you'll never find a copy...

By: attercoppe

attercoppe — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:26:36 -0800

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Just kidding. But an enthusiastic second to The Thing, which is really "Who Goes There?", by John W. Campbell, Jr., writing as Don A. Stuart. Aliens and intrigue in Antarctica. (Found, among other places, in Avon's Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume IIA, edited by Ben Bova.)

By: gaelenh

gaelenh — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:43:47 -0800

Not science fiction, but Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt are two great comic book miniseries that take place in Antarctica. The publisher, Oni Press, even has part of the first one online for free .

By: gimonca

gimonca — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:48:43 -0800

Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness".

By: Marit

Marit — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:15:14 -0800

An enthusiastic third for The Thing. I prefer John Carpenter's other "alien" movie (Starman) but The Thing has an amazing atmosphere. The X-Files episode you mention was basically The Thing rehashed.

And I thought of A Pail of Air too! Definitely read Capn's link.

By: RoseovSharon

RoseovSharon — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:19:44 -0800

The third part of His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman involves some great adventures in a snowy land ruled by bears, with full on ice palaces and everything. Great series, I'm pretty sure this ice world is only experienced in the 3rd book though (buts it's been a while since I read them).

By: Hildago

Hildago — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:25:56 -0800

Well, a good chunk of Frankenstein.

But the first thing I thought of was a short story by Roger Zelazny called The Keys to December, about some aliens terraforming a planet to make it cold enough for them to inhabit (and simultaneously freezing the monkey-people natives to death).

By: George_Spiggott

George_Spiggott — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:53:39 -0800

Neverness by Paul Zindell takes place largely on an ice world, with a very technologically advanced protagonist living among essentially stone age people. A significant and (IMO) impressively writtern part of Endymion by Dan Simmons also takes place on an ice world, but you really should read the two Hyperion novels first. Alan Dean Foster wrote Icerigger, which I have not read but it sort of looks like fun.

By: sarahnade

sarahnade — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:44:03 -0800

RoseovSharon, I think the first book of the trilogy, The Golden Compass (US title), also has some scenes in the snowy northland (the compound with all the children in particular, I'm thinking).

Nonetheless, His Dark Materials is a great trilogy and I think worth reading in general. The setting of the north pole area plays a large part in the plot, if that makes any difference.

By: teleskiving

teleskiving — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:51:53 -0800

Another vote for "At the Mountains of Madness".

By: QIbHom

QIbHom — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:52:31 -0800

Sonny Jim said:

Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

In the US, it was published as _Smilla's Sense of Snow_ and marketed as a mystery. It was a bit odd, but this SciFi reader likes odd.

By: dott8080

dott8080 — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 22:19:47 -0800

This one's not scifi, more a thriller, but set in cold climates:

Alistair MacLean, "Ice Station Zebra"