Back in 2011, when our little corner of the universe was covered in snow, we asked our Twitter followers to name as many snow planets as they could. Four years later, with another Snowpocalypse upon us, we’ve had time to think up even more icy worlds (including our own, depending on who you ask).
Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back is an easy one, but what else is out there?
Twitter user @NAS482 asked, “Does Winter count?” The name alone should be an indicator that The Left Hand of Darkness’ world fits on this list; and Ursula K. Le Guin is tops. You bet.
Delta Vega from the rebooted Star Trek. Never mind how close it orbits to Vulcan, or the whole thing about Vulcan supposedly having no moons, or the fact that it was actually a totally different planet in the original series. Look! Snow!! (Thanks @csilibrarian and @abaddondave.)
In the Stargate Universe episode “Water,” the crew comes upon an ice planet they name Hoth, but instead of tauntauns, this one has poison frozen into the ice!
Narnia is a world, and the White Witch does cover it in Eternal Winter, so commenter Evan H. would be correct in classifying it as a snow planet.
Ditto for Darkover, from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series! Thanks to Elizabeth Bear for reminding us of this one.
Rura Penthe from Star Trek VI and Enterprise: Speaking of cold Star Trek planets visited by Kirk (and Archer, too!), we can’t forget this Klingon penal asteroid. Even though it’s not technically a planet, it’s just as forbidding as other frozen worlds.
In Steven Erickson’s Malazan series, Omtose Phellack was the Elder Hold of the Jaghut, also known as the Hold of Ice. This magical, snowy realm was said to provide the cold necessary to temper the heat of life. (Thanks to commenter stevenhalter for the suggestion!)
Commenter RobMRobM suggested Sol Draconi Septem, the partially terraformed ice planet from Dan Simmons’ Endymion. There, the primitive Chitchatuk have learned to adapt to their awful weather conditions and live in ice tunnels.
It may be cold on the Planet of the Ood (from Doctor Who), but those folks sure can carry a tune! And they have a giant brain there, too.
Commenter Fenric25 came up with several more icy Whovian planets:
- Ribos, an icy planet whose society was patterned after medieval Russia (“The Ribos Operation”)
- Nekros, planet of mourning and secret refuge of Davros (“Revelation of the Daleks”)
- Svartos—or rather, the spaceship Iceworld, located on Svartos’ dark side (“Dragonfire”)
- Earth itself, stuck in the middle of a new Ice Age (“The Ice Warriors”)
On one of the Silfen Paths from Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star (suggested by commenter Gerry__Quinn), the Silfen hunt ice whales!
Commenter Razorgirl pointed out that, while it doesn’t contain life, River’s Ice Planet dessert in Firefly is just as problematic as any of the other celestial bodies on this list.
You know you’re in trouble on Mann when you fly through what you think are clouds and they break off. That’s right—Mann’s planet from Interstellar is so uninhabitable that the clouds freeze, and there’s no surface, just endless honeycombs of ice. Bummer.
Sometimes Earth is the ice world—like in Snowpiercer, when humanity’s attempts to engineer the climate backfire and set off a planet-wide ice age. The survivors are then packed into a train (complete with a class system of haves and have-nots) that circumnavigates the globe over the course of a year.
By that same token, the Earth in Sunshine would also fit. And the Earth in Fritz Leiber’s short story “A Pail of Air.” And the Earth in Hal Clement’s novel Iceworld. The 2015 Snowpocalypse might have spared the East Coast NYC this time, but clearly sci-fi is trying to warn us about our future.
What other ice or snow planets have we missed?
Similar to the Snowpiercer answer, I’m always amazed by how harsh the snow, ice, winters can be in genre fiction set on our own planet. The first example that comes to mind is Dan Simmons’ The Terror which is a terrifying story of sailors being iced in while searching for the Northwest Passage. A second example is the prevalence of arctic settings that arise in genre fiction. From John Carpenters’ The Thing to X-Files’ episode titled Ice and the first season Helix we see how these icy Earth-bound examples are just as likely to provoke a feeling of brutality as any non-Earth example.
The planet of the OnOff star in Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness In the Sky spends most of its time as an ice planet, because its star is turned off, and that’s how we first meet it.
Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster is unsurprisingly set on an ice planet.
So funny. I was trying to think of the particular Dan Simmons book with the intense winter scenes…only to look in this article and see that I cited the book three years ago in the original post.
What about Tran-Ky-Ky?
Helliconia (Brian Aldiss) during winter season?
Or what about the portal planets of “The Forever war”?
Or the planet Dhrawn from Hal Clement “Star Light”?
Are y’all not aware of Warhammer 40,000 universe, wherein published many times over is the mention of the icy deathworld of Fenris, home to the Emperor’s executioners, the mighty Space Wolves?
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Fenris
Jotunheim
The ice planet where Aeryn Sun died and where thousands of almost dead crypts were kept for medical purposes in the Farscape episodes Die Me Dichotomy and Season of Death.
Aquaria is an Ice Planet inhabited by Scientists and Hippies according to NBC-U’s Colonial Travel Guide Reference Book. Also there is that ice moon ‘Djerba’ in Blood and Chrome that houses a Ski Resort and Cylon Cybernetic Ice Snakes.
Schar’s World from Consider Phlebas as described by Xoxarle is pretty brutal…
Let’s never forget the earth in Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown.
Also from Star Wars (both canon and Legends), there’s:
-Mygeeto
-Ilum
-Orto Plutonia
-Rhen Var
-Csilla
-Toola
Narnia doesn’t really count as a world, it’s a country. In the Horse and His Boy, it’s implied that Jadis’ curse didn’t affect Calormen, it’s safe to say not all of the world was affected.
What about the ice-covered world, Ilmator, from A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias?
http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/12/a-darkling-sea-excerpt-james-cambias
Shouldn’t that last line be, “The 2015 Snowpocalypse might have spared the East Coast, but clearly sci-fi is trying to warn us about our future.”
And, while the storm was easy on New York City, that doesn’t mean it spared the entire Coast. We are shoveling a LOT of snow up here in New England. I know you guys in NYC consider yourselves the center of the universe and all, but there is more to the East Coast than NYC!
;-)
i know it’s not technically a world but I can’t help but think of the north in a song of ice and fire. Seems like when winter comes it will be an ice and snow world then
@15: You’re absolutely right, on both counts! We hope everyone up north is keeping safe and warm (and we certainly don’t envy you the shoveling–good luck :)
I would add:
– the ice-age world of Michael Scott Rohan’s “Winter of the World” series
– Tiamat in Joan Vinge’s “The Snow Queen”
– Ricalan in Jo Spurrier’s “Winter Be My Shield”
With ‘honorable mentions’ for Kate Elliott’s “Cold Magic” series, where much of the world is an ice age realm where the ice influences magic, and Philip Pullman’s “Golden Compass” with its north defined by
the Finnish witches and panzer bjorn.
Nilt from Ancillary Justice.
Earth at the end of Cat’s Cradle…
I hope you’re not forgetting the (nameless iirc) planet where the renamed Cheradenine Zakalwe fights on behalf of, and is in the process of getting killed by being kicked out into the snow on an iceberg aircraft carrier when Special Circumstances agent Diziet Sma recruits him into Special Circumstances ….
@5 fizzel Too true! Meanwhile, on the High Nkhtrykh the phagors wait …
I wish I could get some snow. I think I am living in a kind of hot and dry version of Arrakis
The Planet Krypton (in the original Superman movies)
Arthur C Clarke ut the Earth through an ice age in The Forgotten Enemy, but while googling for the title fo that short story, I found that he used the idea of an icy Earth several times, in History Lesson, and at the end of The Fountains of Paradise.
Skaith (by Leigh Bracket)
Petaybee from Anne McCaffrey’s Powers That Be series
What about the planet from Dead Space 3, Tau Volantis? That seems like a pretty scary icy death world to me.
Ursula le Guin has a couple worlds like that – Rocannon’s world gets hit by decades long winters, and if I recall correctly, the world in The Telling was pretty frosty.
Earth is also frozen it one future in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.