Back in 2011 we asked our Twitter followers to name as many snow planets as they could. Seven years later we’re revisiting the list, as the entire east coast finds itself pummeled by a “bomb cyclone” of ice and snow.
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.
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!
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 2018 Snowpocalypse rages on, and clearly sci-fi is trying to warn us about our inevitable future…
What other ice or snow planets have we missed?
Trần-Ky-Ky (Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster)
Earth again (maybe?), this time in Michael Moorcock’s Phoenix in Obsidian (a.k.a. The Silver Warriors), one of his Eternal Champion novels. And yet again (albeit a different version) in Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner.
And maybe a prehistoric version of Earth in Michael Scott Rohan’s Winter of the World trilogy.
And of course another future Earth in Poul Anderson’s novel The Winter of the World.
Thinking of games, definitly Skyrim. And Westeros when Winter is Coming :D
My first thought was the planet Nansen from John Barnes’ A Million Open Doors. Cold in more ways than one.
Its only partially a winter world, but 4 Day Planey by H.Beam Piper is written solely from the perspective of the winter season.
Well I can add quiet a bunch of ice worlds. The German weekly ongoing series of Perry Rhodan spanning from the 60s to now with a running number of 2942 and some side series visited a lot of ice worlds over the years. A list is here:
https://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Eiswelt
(the series was published by ACE Books in the USA from 1969 to 1979 with 144 books)
And then there is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge where Pluto is an ice planet.
Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) constantly finds himself freezing his well tailored arse while his iceworld regiment plays happily in the snow. There’s Simia Orichalcum where the beautiful white snow dunes conceal terrible secrets. And Nusquam Fundimentis with its marvelous thermal heated underground cities which turns out to hold much worse things than Orcs.
No Mention of Ice Planet Zero (original Battlestar Galactica)?
Does Crematoria from Chronicles of Riddick count? Extreme cold during its prolonged night, volcanic in the “day”.
I nominate the Earth in Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air, Nadreck’s Palain 7, and Pluto in Forever War
Wintertime on Helliconia, perhaps?
The unnamed world in “The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazney, where a group of genetically modified people are trying to turn a world into a place cold enought that they can live on it. Then, one of them discovers that the ice age has caused of one of the native animals to evolve intelligence.
Pluto in Larry Niven’s “Wait it Out,” where an explorer crashed on Pluto resolves to turn himself into a statue, exposes himself to outside conditions, and discovers that when it is night, Pluto is cold enought that superconductivity brings his brain back to life. Frozen, unable to move, but able to see and think. That’s true horror.
New Caprica from Battlestar Galactica is maybe not an exclusively icy planet, but is pretty snowy and depressing at times…
The future earth of Niven, Flynn and Pournelle’s Fallen Angels, where climate change has paradoxically led to a new Ice Age.
The far North of The Golden Compass, home to Iorek Byrnison, warrior polar bear, and where the bad guys have their sekrit base.
Anne McCaffrey’s Petaybee, where selkies are real.
@9: That was my second thought, with the first being from the same movie. What’s the name of the planet we first see him on, where he’s running across frozen “waves” of ground?
Palain VII home of Nardreck the second stage lensman in E. E. Smith’s iconic series.
Denali, the Alaskan ethnic world from Julian May’s Galactic Milieu, possibly also Duat, the homeworld of the Tandu and Firvulag, as well as the homeworlds of the Poltroyans.
Komarr is technically an iceball, in Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe.
The Breen of Star Trek apparently live in such a cold environment that their suits are meant to let them walk around without melting.
5, I believe Piper had Earth going through a freezing cycle, and one of the stories featured a person with the crown of England as an heirloom.
Surprised nobody’s mentioned Europa… it is definitively icy, and does appear in a number of SF stories; I’m certain I remember reading about happenings on it by one messer Clarke, in some novel about the year 2000 and something I think…
Sol Draconi Septem, one of the planets the heros travelled to in Dan Simmons’ “Endymion”. As frozen as you can get but still containing life (some tribe of primitive humans and, if I remember correctly, some giant monsters that they hunt).
Having just finished reading “Consider Phelbas” I can nominate Schar’s World. The novel’s story doesn’t spend a lot of time on its surface, but the harshness of that icy environment does contribute to the plot in a big way.
Re #18 above, Europa is one of the opening settings in Dan Simmons’ “Ilium”
Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-snow-queen-joan-d-vinge/1023703077?ean=9780765381774#/
Another Doctor Who mention: Spiridon, a planet with a frozen core and ice volcanoes, where the Daleks try to use these conditions to store an army. Of course, the planet also has dangerous plants and invisible humanoids, because it all makes sense that these kinds of lifeforms should develop on a world with a giant slushie machine at its heart.
Isn’t there a relatively underdeveloped ice world that is a central goal in the Cyteen books, about Union working towards terraforming it as a secondary colony world? Everfrost?
Perhaps Lankiveil in the Dune prequels?
Speaking of cold Star Trek planets – Sarpeidon, where Spock and McCoy time travel into the ice age, nearly die of exposure, and Spock falls in love.
23, that sounds right, but you could also include the Methane-breathers and their very cold worlds.
Titan (aka Saturn’s smog moon).
Technically not a planet, but it definitely qualifies as a ‘brutal ice world’, even if the ice is covered with organic gunk. (And, in places, methane lakes.)
14, as I recall, the new Ice Age in Fallen Angels happened because lefty liberals tried to remediate global warming without knowing–because only libertarians know how science works in later Niven–that we’d passed through the interglacial period and were due for another cold snap.
That said Cueball (Beta Lyra some-number-or-other) from The Soft Weapon certainly belongs on this list. Winter sports involving humans, Puppeteers, Kzinti and ancient sentient weapons.
You’re missing Alan Dean Foster’s Ice Rigger series. I could probably come up with a few more, but I’d need some time going through my SF and Fantasy library.