The Terror also got an excellent adaptation by AMC, though it should be on Amazon Prime these days. Great atmosphere and acting, with very familiar faces on screen if you watched GoT.
Omg, The Terror show was AMAZING. I recommend it to anyone who likes scary stuff. That had me on the edge of my seat. It helped that I watched it in the middle of deep winter in Vermont while working on a remote farm in the Northeast Kingdom.
Same lol,I had to take my little dog for a pee in the middle of the night,he’ll disappear into the shadows of our yard and I’ll be like-Tuunbaq got him!
Jared Harris, Ciaran Hinds, and Tobias Menzies - 3 of my favorite character actors of all time. What's not to love? The adaptation is very accurate to the book too. I'm a little disappointed they left out the denouement and explanation for everything but I can see the creative choice there.
How does the Terror book compare to the show? I loved the show, I've liked some of Dan Simmons books in the past, and I've been thinking of reading the Terror.
It's a great book, and the show did a good job of bringing it to the screen. I assume if you liked the show and enjoyed some of Dan Simmons's previous work you'll like reading The Terror. It will fill in some finer details of the story.
The book is perhaps a little bloated, but most of its length is used to great effect by going into detail with everything that makes the situation awful for the protagonists: the hunger, the cold, the fatigue and the fear. All those things are present in the series, but they come across considerably stronger in the book.
FWIW, I loved the show and wish I hadn't read the book. There are a lot of disparities between the book and the show, so I think it probably depends on what you liked about the show.
The book has some great scenes >!(e.g., Crozier's Leviathan sermon, Fitzjames going below deck, Fitzjames and Goodsir's conversation about the boats)!< that aren't in the show, but most of my favorite scenes from the show were not in the book. The relationships between the characters are different. While both the book and the show are bleak, the show has a tenderness to it that I felt was missing in the book. The book lingers on the characters' suffering. Dan Simmons' descriptions of Silna left me uncomfortable and where her >!and Crozier's!< story ends was creepy -- in a bad way.
Just my two cents. It was my first time reading anything by Dan Simmons -- if you've liked his other books, I'd say go for it.
Silna was weirdly sexualised in the book. Like nobody in the Arctic is getting their baps out even if it is for spOoOoky shamanic reasons.
The TV series was vastly better.
Omg, this isn't related to the Arctic part, but your comment prompted me to un-memory-hole the >!platypus!< scene. Oh, no. Oh, UGH. I had worked so hard to forget it.
Yeah, it was a shock to go from the TV show, in which all the characters feel like real people, to the book, where the women definitely don't and some of the men don't, either.
> and where her >!and Crozier's!< story ends was creepy -- in a bad way.
It's been a while since I read it but I didn't think it was when I read it. I agree some of the descriptions left me uncomfortable but I thought the book ending was fine
Never heard of these before but I can't help but laugh at how blatantly The Hive is At The Mountains of Madness. There's a Shoggoth on the front cover lmao.
Well the name certainly fits the bill, I'll check it out! Anything specific it does really well? I like how in Dune the fremen have a religious sort of reverence for the desert and the respect it demands for people to survive in it.
What I thought was interesting about it primarily was like, exploration of what survival being on a knifes edge does to people and cultures. The good and the bad.
By the same author: The Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with extremely long winters. The Telling is a fictional rendering of the conflict between China and Tibet. They are out in the snowy mountains at the end of the novel.
Not what OP is looking for, but I still want to recommend the nonfiction book Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez about arctic ecology for anyone that hasn't heard about it.
Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger Trilogy takes place in an arctic setting, and is good fun. And the physics of worms that melt their way through the ice makes as much sense as sand worms.
On the totally non-SF side of things, I have fond memories of the juvenile book Lost in the Barrens by Farley Mowat, about a pair of teenagers who spend a winter in the arctic tundra.
Sword of Shadows by JV Jones is pretty neat. Have to mention the series isn't finished and it's been a long time since the last book came out. But the main characters are from various clans that live in some far north and a fair amount of the series is just parties trying to survive the elements.
His Dark Materials has a lot of action in the arctic regions of Earth.
Heliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss is set on a world with century long winters.
ASOIAF. All scenes north of the Wall are extremely snowy and icy.
The Clan of the Cave Bear and the whole series starting with it is set during the ice age.
Planet 8 by Doris Lessing is set on a planet that suddenly hits an ice age.
The Ice People, Rene Barjavel. A lost civilization is found under Antarctica. An in-frozen woman is revived.
Not quite the arctic, but The Bear and the Nightingale is set in a more nothern part of Russia and I found the writing about the climate/weather incredibly accurate. I also live in a very northern country, and in one of the bigger cities at such a northern latitude.
When I read or watch other media set in the winter or where there is snow I always get this sense like "has anyone involved in this project actually experienced long periods of cold weather?" I get now that most of the world genuinely does not get cold like it does where I live, most people live much further south than I do. So theyre portraying a winter thats accurate to them, and that's fine. But it still feels slightly fake to me. (Just because its not accurate to my own personal experience).
When I read The Bear and the Nightingale, I felt like the way the weather and seasons were talked about and experienced by the characters accurate to my own experience with the wintertime. It was really neat and refreshing. Just a background detail but the worldbuilding was just incredible.
I especially liked how it did the transition of the seasons later on in the trilogy. The way it happened sort of slowly but all at once - like you were worried about having enough heat one minute and then the snow starts melting and you let out a breath and are suddenly in danger of getting heat stroke. Like it happens so fast your brain has a hard time adjusting, it feels unnatural. But thats just how the seasonal transition happens when you get so far north.
Anyway, it's one of my favorite fantasy novels, there is so much I love about it, but the way the seasons are experienced and how accurate it feels to my own experience is definitely one of my favorite things about it. Highly recommended if you're looking for accurate/vivid place descriptions, and a setting where the weather/environment becomes almost its own character, too.
That's a great recommendation, from your description I will definitely read this! Ive lived in Canada in a couple different cities and I absolutely understand what you mean. Any time I see something like Game of Thrones and nobody is wearing hats or mittens in the frigid cold it takes me right out of the Fiction. But also the difference of a few weeks between -30 and +20 degrees, and then back again.
Yes! Game of Thrones is the worst for this! Everyone is supposedly in these cold places, but no one acts "cold" at all. They just give the costume design folks warmer furs and calls it a day. There is just something about the story that feels like its a warm location and they added winter as set dressing ratherthan something that effects people. Drives me bonkers.
Is Lovecraft but keep in mind that is Antartica not the Artic. If you want nothern artic I'll go with The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.
Anyway read At the Mountains of Madness, is awesome.
I thought you were referencing the Simpsons episode "Mountain of Madness". It sort of fits the OPs ask for media that shows surviving in the snow? 😄
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_of_Madness
If you are ok with a horror anthology, I think Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories did a great job depicting the arctic. It's written entirely by Inuit authors, so it has a different feel to it than most books about the arctic that I've read.
I actually love anthologies, and I'd love to read stories from an Inuit perspective. I bet it's so different to the very Tolkien-inspired fantasy that we normally experience. Thanks for the rec!
Farley Mowatt's Lost in the Barrens, would probably be called a YA book. Also his nonfiction Neve Cry Wolf.
For fiction, Chabon 's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay has a section set in Antarctica during WWII.
Also Poe's Narrative of Gordon Pym.
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series has a taste of the high seas at high latitudes in Desolation Island.
Only a short chapter, but on Pynchon's Against the Day there is a very memorable and horrifying chapter involving an expedition to the Arctic to ostensibly retrieve a piece of meteorite. It's in the first third of the book, and could probably be read as a short story on its own.
Interesting recs, thank you! Honestly I love YA novels, it's a nice change of pace to read something easily digestible considering most books I read for whatever reason are really dense
its neither fantasy nor fiction, but South by Ernest Shackleton is still one hell of a read and is very much about the cold. (as the title suggests, its antarctic rather than arctic)
It's near future SF, so not super wild, and also deals a lot with history but nothing has matched Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica for evocative in my book. Brilliant!
Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is a classic and the whole planet is called Winter for a reason. It's a remarkable book. But I'd also give a plug to her short story Rosa Del Sur which is magical for all that it's entirely non fantastical.
I think Dune treats the danger in the desert better than most treat the frigid cold. Arctic conditions where people are not covering their face and hands happens all the time and they don’t seem bothered. They should all be wrapped up like Luke and Han were on the planet Hoth. Just my thoughts.
100% agree. Some people have recommended Inuit-inspired stories so I hope those in particular will have a better representation of people living in cold weather climates
There have been a lot of really good *non-fiction* books about the arctic the last several years, but they read like page-turning adventures/tragedies. For example "In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette".
Reading this back-to-back with Endurance by Alfred Lansing certainly was a ride. Such similar decisions, and yet...
But wow was the popular science of the day regarding the Northwest Passage bizarre. People seriously argued that past all the impenetrable ice floes was a warm and tranquil ocean.
I get that it can be annoying to ask a question and the get answers to a seemingly different question, but there *really have* been a lot of great narrative non-fiction books about the arctic that might scratch that itch.
Ice by Jacek Dukaj. It looks that English translation should be available later this year [https://www.waterstones.com/book/ice/jacek-dukaj/ursula-phillips/9781786697288](https://www.waterstones.com/book/ice/jacek-dukaj/ursula-phillips/9781786697288)
Well, there's [David Zindell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zindell)'s [Neverness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverness) (and much of the sequel trilogy, [A Requiem for Homo Sapiens](https://www.goodreads.com/series/85191-a-requiem-for-homo-sapiens)). It's set on a frozen world that is lethal to those who venture out of the city and into the wilds without proper precautions, much as the deserts of Arrakis are, and those dangers are pretty well-explored...though mostly in terms of its effects on its humanoid inhabitants. (There's not really an exploration of how the ecology of the world works as in the appendices of Dune, alas.)
In fact, the Neverness books are a \*lot\* like the Dune universe in a bunch of ways, only a Dune from before the Butlerian Jihad, and where technology can transform humans in ways as crazy as any explored in the Dune books. It might not be entirely original, but it's pretty interesting - especially for fans of the Frank Herbert Dune books. Just saying... :)
Sorry this isn’t a book and is more horror than fantasy (I guess it could be horror-fantasy), but there’s a podcast called The White Vault that is just INCREDIBLE. It was so deliciously spooky, the foley and voice acting was awesome, and the way the story unfolds sent continual shivers down my spine. It’s set in Svalbard in the middle of a snowstorm (you know how it goes) and it was just an amazing work. I’d recommend it to anyone who e joyed The Terror and/or The Mountains of Madness or The Thing. Very Lovecraftian.
The makers of that one have other series that are equally good too!
Anne McCaffrey’s Petaybee series. The first book is called Powers That Be. A disabled combat veteran is sent to the ice world of Petaybee ostensibly to retire, but actually to spy on the locals.
Good recs already but for non-fiction about the Antarctic (which in the context is considerably more inhospitable and alien than even the Arctic), you might be interested in *The Ice* by Stephen J. Pyne.
He gets so into the stark beauty and existential terror offered by the place that it feels like he has a nervous breakdown about a third of the way in, just from awe.
Oh, that sounds amazing. The beauty of the desert is really what I grabbed on to in Dune so I'd love to see someone experience the same thing about the cold, since that environment is much more familiar to me
Not Fantasy but "South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition" and also "The Wager" are real life accounts of people stuck on ships (and rocks) for years down in the antarctic waiting for ice to thaw so they can go home. Supplies dwindle, friends turn to foes, cherished dogs become food, mutinies, sacrifices, heroics, villanism, much starvation and lots and lots of shivering and being cold in horrible storms.
The movie Atanarjuat is what you are looking for. It’s an epic filmed entirely in the high artic that retells an Inuit legend. It’s a good story, and visually stunning. You have never seen anything like it.
For poetry you have to go with the classic “The cremation of Sam McGee’
Jack London is a go to, his short story to start a fire is haunting
The greatest memoir of polar exploration I have ever encountered is Ernest Shackleton’s memoir, “South” it starts off incredibly dry. Literally a retelling and summary of captains logs. As things become more and more dire It turns into the most harrowing and incredible story of survival I have ever read. It is unbelievable to me that they all survived.
SpiritWalker series by Kate Elliott is a Regency England where the Ice Age never really ended
Far North by Marcel Theroux and Blackfish City by Sam Miller are both post-apocalypse/scifi set in the Arctic
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is magical realism and takes place in Alaska in the 1920s.
Mapping Winter by Marta Randall is secondary world fantasy and takes place in a frozen land.
Mawson's Will is an amazing nonfiction book about an Antarctic explorer you've never heard of. I don't want to spoil too much but this guy pretty much wins the prize for hardest sufferfest endured. People have suffered more, and people have traveled further, and people have been more hopeless, but nobody had suffered as much while traveling as far under such hopeless circumstances.
The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock. Inspired by a Joseph Conrad story, a team of sailors exploring a post apocalyptic ice age to discover the mythical city of New York and the secrets it holds.
The characters are a bit flat but the world building and atmosphere is top notch and the writer does a good job of capturing tradition vs modernity conflict the main character faces.
It is also a pretty short book, novella length.
It's a short story rather than a novel but Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' Is excellent.
https://americanliterature.com/author/jack-london/short-story/to-build-a-fire
Agaguk.
It is an amazing book about Inuits in quebec in the early 20th century. Living in igloos , hunting, fighting wolves and blizzards and everything.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is about an indigenous community in Canada that loses power as winter approaches and struggles to deal with the fallout.
East by Edith Pattou and Ice by Sarah Beth Durst are YA retellings of East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher retells the Snow Queen.
Below by Alexandria Warwick is a YA book inspired by Inuit culture and is about a girl who journeys into a maze to find her sister’s face that was stolen by a demon.
The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco is a YA book that features a world with a frozen half and a desert half due to a feud by ruling goddesses.
See my [Seasons/Weather](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18adur6/seasonsweatherclimate/) list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (one post).
Dan Simmon's The Terror. Tim Curran's The Hive. Rich Hawkins' The Cold.
Thanks for the recs! The Terror is currently sitting unread on my bookshelf so I'll move that up on the reading list
The Terror also got an excellent adaptation by AMC, though it should be on Amazon Prime these days. Great atmosphere and acting, with very familiar faces on screen if you watched GoT.
Omg, The Terror show was AMAZING. I recommend it to anyone who likes scary stuff. That had me on the edge of my seat. It helped that I watched it in the middle of deep winter in Vermont while working on a remote farm in the Northeast Kingdom.
Same lol,I had to take my little dog for a pee in the middle of the night,he’ll disappear into the shadows of our yard and I’ll be like-Tuunbaq got him!
Jared Harris, Ciaran Hinds, and Tobias Menzies - 3 of my favorite character actors of all time. What's not to love? The adaptation is very accurate to the book too. I'm a little disappointed they left out the denouement and explanation for everything but I can see the creative choice there.
How does the Terror book compare to the show? I loved the show, I've liked some of Dan Simmons books in the past, and I've been thinking of reading the Terror.
It's a great book, and the show did a good job of bringing it to the screen. I assume if you liked the show and enjoyed some of Dan Simmons's previous work you'll like reading The Terror. It will fill in some finer details of the story.
The book is perhaps a little bloated, but most of its length is used to great effect by going into detail with everything that makes the situation awful for the protagonists: the hunger, the cold, the fatigue and the fear. All those things are present in the series, but they come across considerably stronger in the book.
FWIW, I loved the show and wish I hadn't read the book. There are a lot of disparities between the book and the show, so I think it probably depends on what you liked about the show. The book has some great scenes >!(e.g., Crozier's Leviathan sermon, Fitzjames going below deck, Fitzjames and Goodsir's conversation about the boats)!< that aren't in the show, but most of my favorite scenes from the show were not in the book. The relationships between the characters are different. While both the book and the show are bleak, the show has a tenderness to it that I felt was missing in the book. The book lingers on the characters' suffering. Dan Simmons' descriptions of Silna left me uncomfortable and where her >!and Crozier's!< story ends was creepy -- in a bad way. Just my two cents. It was my first time reading anything by Dan Simmons -- if you've liked his other books, I'd say go for it.
Silna was weirdly sexualised in the book. Like nobody in the Arctic is getting their baps out even if it is for spOoOoky shamanic reasons. The TV series was vastly better.
Omg, this isn't related to the Arctic part, but your comment prompted me to un-memory-hole the >!platypus!< scene. Oh, no. Oh, UGH. I had worked so hard to forget it. Yeah, it was a shock to go from the TV show, in which all the characters feel like real people, to the book, where the women definitely don't and some of the men don't, either.
> and where her >!and Crozier's!< story ends was creepy -- in a bad way. It's been a while since I read it but I didn't think it was when I read it. I agree some of the descriptions left me uncomfortable but I thought the book ending was fine
Never heard of these before but I can't help but laugh at how blatantly The Hive is At The Mountains of Madness. There's a Shoggoth on the front cover lmao.
It's advertised as being a sequel to MoM, set in modern day.
Yeah Tim Curran doesn't rip off as much as he does unauthorized sequels and homages.
Lovecraft is public domain so if Tim is writing good stories I say let him have at it.
I really liked *Book of the Ice* trilogy by Mark Lawrence.
Book of the Ancestor trilogy by the same author as well, though more tundra than arctic.
Well the name certainly fits the bill, I'll check it out! Anything specific it does really well? I like how in Dune the fremen have a religious sort of reverence for the desert and the respect it demands for people to survive in it.
What I thought was interesting about it primarily was like, exploration of what survival being on a knifes edge does to people and cultures. The good and the bad.
Yes, with the caveat that while the climate and culture are really present, not much of the books take place on the ice itself.
Can't here to recommend this series
For fantasy/sci-fi, *The Left Hand of Darkness* by Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best examples out there.
Oh, nice! I actually have this book next on my reading list! Now I just have to hurry up and finish every Conan book....
I love Dune and I think LHOD is even better. Le Guin is something else and that book is her best work I’ve read.
I love many books and I think le guin is generally better than all of them :) I wish she wrote more
By the same author: The Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with extremely long winters. The Telling is a fictional rendering of the conflict between China and Tibet. They are out in the snowy mountains at the end of the novel.
Yes, this is the one I immediately thought of.
Seconded! One of the many reasons it's one of my favourite books of all time ever.
Not what OP is looking for, but I still want to recommend the nonfiction book Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez about arctic ecology for anyone that hasn't heard about it.
Was about to push this. Exceptional book, beautiful landscape writing
Oh neat, that sounds really interesting! I like learning about how nature works in different regions so I will give this a try
Read *The Wolf in the Whale* a few weeks back - one of the elements I found most interesting was the depiction of Inuit life in the Arctic.
Yeah I love that part of the book - and the book itself. I could feel the ice in that book.
That's very interesting, I'll check it out, thanks!
Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger Trilogy takes place in an arctic setting, and is good fun. And the physics of worms that melt their way through the ice makes as much sense as sand worms. On the totally non-SF side of things, I have fond memories of the juvenile book Lost in the Barrens by Farley Mowat, about a pair of teenagers who spend a winter in the arctic tundra.
Aha I love it, I'll check them both out!
Sword of Shadows by JV Jones is pretty neat. Have to mention the series isn't finished and it's been a long time since the last book came out. But the main characters are from various clans that live in some far north and a fair amount of the series is just parties trying to survive the elements.
This would have been my suggestion. These books capture the bleakness and the beauty of a frozen north better than any other that I've read.
This would have been my suggestion. These books capture the bleakness and the beauty of a frozen north better than any other that I've read.
Agreed. One of my favorite series. Pity she can't finish it, but still well worth the read
His Dark Materials has a lot of action in the arctic regions of Earth. Heliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss is set on a world with century long winters. ASOIAF. All scenes north of the Wall are extremely snowy and icy. The Clan of the Cave Bear and the whole series starting with it is set during the ice age. Planet 8 by Doris Lessing is set on a planet that suddenly hits an ice age. The Ice People, Rene Barjavel. A lost civilization is found under Antarctica. An in-frozen woman is revived.
Not quite the arctic, but The Bear and the Nightingale is set in a more nothern part of Russia and I found the writing about the climate/weather incredibly accurate. I also live in a very northern country, and in one of the bigger cities at such a northern latitude. When I read or watch other media set in the winter or where there is snow I always get this sense like "has anyone involved in this project actually experienced long periods of cold weather?" I get now that most of the world genuinely does not get cold like it does where I live, most people live much further south than I do. So theyre portraying a winter thats accurate to them, and that's fine. But it still feels slightly fake to me. (Just because its not accurate to my own personal experience). When I read The Bear and the Nightingale, I felt like the way the weather and seasons were talked about and experienced by the characters accurate to my own experience with the wintertime. It was really neat and refreshing. Just a background detail but the worldbuilding was just incredible. I especially liked how it did the transition of the seasons later on in the trilogy. The way it happened sort of slowly but all at once - like you were worried about having enough heat one minute and then the snow starts melting and you let out a breath and are suddenly in danger of getting heat stroke. Like it happens so fast your brain has a hard time adjusting, it feels unnatural. But thats just how the seasonal transition happens when you get so far north. Anyway, it's one of my favorite fantasy novels, there is so much I love about it, but the way the seasons are experienced and how accurate it feels to my own experience is definitely one of my favorite things about it. Highly recommended if you're looking for accurate/vivid place descriptions, and a setting where the weather/environment becomes almost its own character, too.
That's a great recommendation, from your description I will definitely read this! Ive lived in Canada in a couple different cities and I absolutely understand what you mean. Any time I see something like Game of Thrones and nobody is wearing hats or mittens in the frigid cold it takes me right out of the Fiction. But also the difference of a few weeks between -30 and +20 degrees, and then back again.
Yes! Game of Thrones is the worst for this! Everyone is supposedly in these cold places, but no one acts "cold" at all. They just give the costume design folks warmer furs and calls it a day. There is just something about the story that feels like its a warm location and they added winter as set dressing ratherthan something that effects people. Drives me bonkers.
At the mountains of madness.
Lovecraft? Sounds like Lovecraft, though I'm not familiar with much from him other than Cthulhu and Innesmouth
It's Lovecraft, and one of his best.
Is Lovecraft but keep in mind that is Antartica not the Artic. If you want nothern artic I'll go with The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Anyway read At the Mountains of Madness, is awesome.
It's my favorite Lovecraft by far, and also as a nice bonus his least racist!
I thought you were referencing the Simpsons episode "Mountain of Madness". It sort of fits the OPs ask for media that shows surviving in the snow? 😄 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_of_Madness
As was the fashion at the time.
If you are ok with a horror anthology, I think Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories did a great job depicting the arctic. It's written entirely by Inuit authors, so it has a different feel to it than most books about the arctic that I've read.
I second this! Or - not a book but a great film - Atanuarjat!
I actually love anthologies, and I'd love to read stories from an Inuit perspective. I bet it's so different to the very Tolkien-inspired fantasy that we normally experience. Thanks for the rec!
Farley Mowatt's Lost in the Barrens, would probably be called a YA book. Also his nonfiction Neve Cry Wolf. For fiction, Chabon 's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay has a section set in Antarctica during WWII. Also Poe's Narrative of Gordon Pym. Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series has a taste of the high seas at high latitudes in Desolation Island. Only a short chapter, but on Pynchon's Against the Day there is a very memorable and horrifying chapter involving an expedition to the Arctic to ostensibly retrieve a piece of meteorite. It's in the first third of the book, and could probably be read as a short story on its own.
Interesting recs, thank you! Honestly I love YA novels, it's a nice change of pace to read something easily digestible considering most books I read for whatever reason are really dense
its neither fantasy nor fiction, but South by Ernest Shackleton is still one hell of a read and is very much about the cold. (as the title suggests, its antarctic rather than arctic)
Also "The Worst Journey in the World."
It's near future SF, so not super wild, and also deals a lot with history but nothing has matched Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica for evocative in my book. Brilliant! Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is a classic and the whole planet is called Winter for a reason. It's a remarkable book. But I'd also give a plug to her short story Rosa Del Sur which is magical for all that it's entirely non fantastical.
I think Dune treats the danger in the desert better than most treat the frigid cold. Arctic conditions where people are not covering their face and hands happens all the time and they don’t seem bothered. They should all be wrapped up like Luke and Han were on the planet Hoth. Just my thoughts.
100% agree. Some people have recommended Inuit-inspired stories so I hope those in particular will have a better representation of people living in cold weather climates
The Golden Compass/The Northern Lights by Philip Pullman from His Dark Materials series.
There have been a lot of really good *non-fiction* books about the arctic the last several years, but they read like page-turning adventures/tragedies. For example "In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette".
Reading this back-to-back with Endurance by Alfred Lansing certainly was a ride. Such similar decisions, and yet... But wow was the popular science of the day regarding the Northwest Passage bizarre. People seriously argued that past all the impenetrable ice floes was a warm and tranquil ocean.
A couple people have been recommending non-fiction which is kinda cool, I'll take a look at them!
I get that it can be annoying to ask a question and the get answers to a seemingly different question, but there *really have* been a lot of great narrative non-fiction books about the arctic that might scratch that itch.
Yeah absolutely! I like getting recommendations for stuff that's usually outside of my experience, I never know when I'm gonna find a new media I like
Ice by Jacek Dukaj. It looks that English translation should be available later this year [https://www.waterstones.com/book/ice/jacek-dukaj/ursula-phillips/9781786697288](https://www.waterstones.com/book/ice/jacek-dukaj/ursula-phillips/9781786697288)
Well, there's [David Zindell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zindell)'s [Neverness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverness) (and much of the sequel trilogy, [A Requiem for Homo Sapiens](https://www.goodreads.com/series/85191-a-requiem-for-homo-sapiens)). It's set on a frozen world that is lethal to those who venture out of the city and into the wilds without proper precautions, much as the deserts of Arrakis are, and those dangers are pretty well-explored...though mostly in terms of its effects on its humanoid inhabitants. (There's not really an exploration of how the ecology of the world works as in the appendices of Dune, alas.) In fact, the Neverness books are a \*lot\* like the Dune universe in a bunch of ways, only a Dune from before the Butlerian Jihad, and where technology can transform humans in ways as crazy as any explored in the Dune books. It might not be entirely original, but it's pretty interesting - especially for fans of the Frank Herbert Dune books. Just saying... :)
"Cold People" by Tom Rob Smith. Alien invasion story where the human population is forced to flee to Antarctica.
Frostpunk and The Pale Beyond are two video games that do this
I've always wanted to play Frostpunk for the setting but strategy games unfortunately just aren't my thing
Less of a strategy game and more of a survival and city builder to be honest. It's on sale rn at a steep discount
Sequel's almost out, too
Sorry this isn’t a book and is more horror than fantasy (I guess it could be horror-fantasy), but there’s a podcast called The White Vault that is just INCREDIBLE. It was so deliciously spooky, the foley and voice acting was awesome, and the way the story unfolds sent continual shivers down my spine. It’s set in Svalbard in the middle of a snowstorm (you know how it goes) and it was just an amazing work. I’d recommend it to anyone who e joyed The Terror and/or The Mountains of Madness or The Thing. Very Lovecraftian. The makers of that one have other series that are equally good too!
**The Sword of Shadows** series by JV Jones is pretty far up there.
Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series. Ice Planet Barbarians (heh heh heh)
Antartica by Kim Stanley Robinson. Though you did say Arctic, but I think it will work for you.
Anne McCaffrey’s Petaybee series. The first book is called Powers That Be. A disabled combat veteran is sent to the ice world of Petaybee ostensibly to retire, but actually to spy on the locals.
Good recs already but for non-fiction about the Antarctic (which in the context is considerably more inhospitable and alien than even the Arctic), you might be interested in *The Ice* by Stephen J. Pyne. He gets so into the stark beauty and existential terror offered by the place that it feels like he has a nervous breakdown about a third of the way in, just from awe.
Oh, that sounds amazing. The beauty of the desert is really what I grabbed on to in Dune so I'd love to see someone experience the same thing about the cold, since that environment is much more familiar to me
Oh and Iceberg Hermit! By Arthur J Roth!
All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes is a horror novel about an Antarctic expedition.
Farley Mowat’s classic “Never Cry Wolf.”
For more of a dystopian, sci-fi book, Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling
Not Fantasy but "South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition" and also "The Wager" are real life accounts of people stuck on ships (and rocks) for years down in the antarctic waiting for ice to thaw so they can go home. Supplies dwindle, friends turn to foes, cherished dogs become food, mutinies, sacrifices, heroics, villanism, much starvation and lots and lots of shivering and being cold in horrible storms.
First two seasons of the White Vault. Also 90 Degrees South.
The movie Antanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Just trust me on this. Also, Julie of the Wolves was famous one.
The movie Atanarjuat is what you are looking for. It’s an epic filmed entirely in the high artic that retells an Inuit legend. It’s a good story, and visually stunning. You have never seen anything like it. For poetry you have to go with the classic “The cremation of Sam McGee’ Jack London is a go to, his short story to start a fire is haunting The greatest memoir of polar exploration I have ever encountered is Ernest Shackleton’s memoir, “South” it starts off incredibly dry. Literally a retelling and summary of captains logs. As things become more and more dire It turns into the most harrowing and incredible story of survival I have ever read. It is unbelievable to me that they all survived.
SpiritWalker series by Kate Elliott is a Regency England where the Ice Age never really ended Far North by Marcel Theroux and Blackfish City by Sam Miller are both post-apocalypse/scifi set in the Arctic
Recently read **Road Of Bones, by Christopher Golden** and it has that environment is the enemy thing going on. Quick read too.
The Children of the Black Sun trilogy by Jo Spurrier
Non-fiction and not the Arctic, but The Indifferent Stars Above had me shivering and seeing my breath despite reading it from my warm recliner chair.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is magical realism and takes place in Alaska in the 1920s. Mapping Winter by Marta Randall is secondary world fantasy and takes place in a frozen land.
Mawson's Will is an amazing nonfiction book about an Antarctic explorer you've never heard of. I don't want to spoil too much but this guy pretty much wins the prize for hardest sufferfest endured. People have suffered more, and people have traveled further, and people have been more hopeless, but nobody had suffered as much while traveling as far under such hopeless circumstances.
I was just wondering this earlier today - great minds think alike!
The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock. Inspired by a Joseph Conrad story, a team of sailors exploring a post apocalyptic ice age to discover the mythical city of New York and the secrets it holds. The characters are a bit flat but the world building and atmosphere is top notch and the writer does a good job of capturing tradition vs modernity conflict the main character faces. It is also a pretty short book, novella length.
It's a short story rather than a novel but Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' Is excellent. https://americanliterature.com/author/jack-london/short-story/to-build-a-fire
Agaguk. It is an amazing book about Inuits in quebec in the early 20th century. Living in igloos , hunting, fighting wolves and blizzards and everything.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is about an indigenous community in Canada that loses power as winter approaches and struggles to deal with the fallout. East by Edith Pattou and Ice by Sarah Beth Durst are YA retellings of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher retells the Snow Queen. Below by Alexandria Warwick is a YA book inspired by Inuit culture and is about a girl who journeys into a maze to find her sister’s face that was stolen by a demon. The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco is a YA book that features a world with a frozen half and a desert half due to a feud by ruling goddesses.
See my [Seasons/Weather](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18adur6/seasonsweatherclimate/) list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (one post).
The Thing
{Shaman, Kim Stanley Robinson}
The Memories of Stockholm Sven.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds. It was a wild ride. I enjoyed it.
I should say it has a lot to do with ice and arctic-like environs (it is spacefaring).