OK, in honor of this reasonably impressive blizzard we’re having here on the East coast, I present to you: the top 10 ice planets. All media fair game.
By the way, I nominate “ice planet” — not the movie, the idea — for top 10 things that need both a Wikipedia entry and a TV Tropes entry. (Right now in TV Tropes it falls under “Single Setting Planet.”) Yeah, I know, if I want it I should write it and not bitch about it.
1. Hoth. I’ll see you in hell.
2. Narnia under the White Witch. It’s always winter, never Christmas.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIgd4czEZiA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
(More on Techland: The Five Underrated Sci-Fi Movie Masterpieces)
3. Snowball Earth. This probably actually happened. See, during an Ice Age, once the Earth’s albedo gets over a certain point, it reflects so much light (as opposed to absorbing it as heat) that it stays in a highly stable state of full glaciation … anyway.
4. Rura Penthe (Star Trek VI) and Delta Vega (Star Trek XI). They have to share a spot, since they’re not all that fully realized qua ice planets. But still. They’re pretty icy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc_jYAtfDis&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
(More on Techland: The Top 10 Spaceships: A Tale of Thrusters and Heat Shields)
5. Pluto. Yeah, it’s real, so what? Thing’s still made of ice. Or partly. If I had to pick the best fictional context for Pluto, it’d have to be the part in Larry Niven’s World of Ptavvs (top 10 greatest titles ever!) where somebody tries to land a rocket on it, and it turns out that a lot of the frozen gases are flammable, and the whole planet catches on fire.