1) INTRODUCTION
Welcome to MonSFFA’s February 2025, “mid-winter” meeting! Take a break from shovelling your walk and join us for a few hours of sci-fi fun!
Today’s proceedings will be getting underway shortly. We are meeting exclusively online, today; join our ZOOM-chat and take part in the meeting from the warmth and comfort of home! See the instructions, immediately below (Item 2), to join in and participate on ZOOM.
Our programming agenda begins at 1:00PM; the meeting will conclude at 5:00PM. This opening post has gone up 30 minutes before the meeting’s start time to allow folk to gather online at their leisure.
A closing post will go up at 5:00PM to officially thank today’s presenters/discussion moderators, and to publish the date of the next MonSFFA event.
2) JOIN THIS AFTERNOON’S VIDEO-CHAT ON ZOOM!
To take part in this afternoon’s meeting online, join our ZOOM video-chat, which will run throughout the next few hours. Simply click here and follow the prompts: This Afternoon’s MonSFFA Meeting on ZOOM
If you’re not fully equipped to ZOOM, you can also take part by phone (voice only); in the Montreal area, the toll-free number to call is: 1-438-809-7799.
Also, have this information on hand as you may be asked to enter it:
Meeting ID: 873 2473 3518
Passcode: 454855
3) FEBRUARY 2025 MEETING THEME
Snap a few photos of your hobby work space to share with the group, and tell us all about your genre-flavoured hobbies!
4) THIS AFTERNOON’S AGENDA
Today’s programming agenda is as follows:
1:00PM – What Goes Well with SF/F?
Romance, mystery, horror, Western—which genres mix well with our favourite types of story, science fiction and fantasy? We’ll discuss!
2:00PM – Water in SF/F!
An indispensable necessity for life as we know it, we’ll explore SF/F’s use of water as a story element!
3:00PM – Break
Club business, announcements, and raffle
3:30PM – My Hobby Space!
We all have hobbies—painting, sculpting, scale-model building, knitting, writing fanfic, etc. We’ll ask “Where in your home is located your hobby workstation—corner nook, basement workshop, kitchen table?” Snap a few photos of your work space to share with the group, and tell us all about your genre-flavoured hobbies!
4:30PM – Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up!
We close the afternoon with final thoughts, questions, and commentary on today’s topics, or other subjects members may have to briefly share with the group. Your feedback, dear members, is always welcome!
Please Note: While we strive to keep on schedule, we do, sometimes, fall behind a little, or find ourselves having to reshuffle the order of items on the agenda for one reason or another, or reschedule planned presentations/discussions. Therefore, please understand that all programming is subject to change!
5) WINTER WORLDS OF SF/F
In the midst of this recent spate of winter weather, we are reminded of a recurrent setting in SF/F, the ice planet, or ice realm! While we await the start of the meeting, here, for your consideration, are a few winter worlds of note and interest.
Hoth:
Perhaps the best-known ice world in sci-fi by virtue of the blockbuster popularity of the Star Wars franchise, this snow-covered planet was, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the setting of a thrilling battle between rag-tag Rebel forces and an imposing, mechanized Imperial army.
Rura Penthe: 
An icy, unforgiving world on which the Klingons have established a penal colony, Admiral Kirk and Doctor McCoy were imprisoned here in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).
Another ice world in the Star Trek universe is Delta Vega, featured in the reboot film Star Trek (2009).
And, in the original series episode “All Our Yesterdays” (1969), the Enterprise visits the planet Sarpeidon, soon to be destroyed by a supernova. The people of Sarpeidon escape doom by time-travelling into the past by way of a machine called the Atavachron, and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy are unintentionally transported back some 5000 years, to the planet’s ice age, where all they have to keep them warm are the shelter of a cave heated by a hot spring, animal skins, and Mariette Hartley!
Barsoom’s North Pole:
Home to the Okar of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars, the third book in his seminal planetary romance adventure series. Thought extinct, the Okar, or Yellow Martians, live in secret within glass-domed cities built to protect them from the severe arctic environment. When outside, they wear heavy furs of Apt or Orluk, wildlife indigenous to Barsoom’s northern polar region.
Frigia:
Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strip premiered in 1934, and featured the planet Mongo, a far-northern territory of which encompasses the ice kingdom Frigia, so cold as to be entirely inhospitable to all but the native peoples of this area, who wear special synthetic, and oddly transparent, clothing to repel the cold. Frigia is ruled by the beautiful blonde Queen Fria, who takes a liking to the handsome, titular space adventurer and hero, much to the consternation of his girlfriend, Dale Arden. The wildlife of Frigia include Snow Oxen, Ice Bears, Snow Dragons, Snowbirds, and Ice Worms.
Zura:
In Ray Cummings’ novelette “Revolt in the Ice Empire,” first published in the fall 1940 issue of Planet Stories, an expedition from Earth aboard the spaceship Planeteer arrives on Zura, described as “a frigid little world” with “patches of snow and sleek blue ice everywhere.” An asteroid following an elliptical orbit around the sun, Zura is rich in the valuable element Xalite. Tara, a beautiful Earth girl, rules over the less sophisticated native Zurians, her father having travelled to the asteroid from Earth in a previous expedition with the intention of establishing a perfect society. But the Planeteer brings with it avarice, violence, fear, and revolt soon stirs, the Utopian dream Tara inherited from her father quickly becoming a nightmare!
Iskar:
In Leigh Brackett’s “The Lake of the Gone Forever,” first featured in the October 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Iskar is a wintery world the topography of which includes a semi-liquid lake having “particles of some transuranic element” which acts as a repository of the memories of Iskar’s dead.
Gethen:
Also known as “Winter,” this bitterly cold world populated by the ambisexual Gethenians is the setting of Ursula K. LeGuin’s acclaimed The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), one of the leading examples of feminist SF. A major theme of the book is the effect of sex and gender on culture and society.
Tran-Ky-Ky:
A group of spaceship passengers find themselves shipwrecked on the windblown ice world Tran-Ky-Ky in Alan Dean Foster’s Icerigger trilogy (1974-1987) The planet’s native population are burly, cat-faced bipeds having sail-like membranes under their arms and extended, curved claws on their feet that serve as ice skates, allowing them to easily manoeuver over a glacial landscape.
Helliconia:
Brian W. Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy (1982-1985) traces the rise and fall of a civilization over more than a thousand years on the planet Helliconia, where the seasons are measured not in months, but centuries! Situated within a binary star system and slightly larger than Earth, Helliconia sustains vast polar ice caps, even during the hot summer season. The planet’s northern continent, Sibornal, is the setting of the third book in the series, Helliconia Winter. Ice Age conditions prevail during the Helliconian winter, and a major theme of the books is the influence of climate on human civilization.
Narnia:
A hundred-year winter, with no Christmas, has descended on C. S. Lewis’ magical fantasy realm, Narnia, brought about by the evil White Witch, who rules the land. The arrival of the Pevensie children, however, in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) marks the beginning of the end of her dominance.
Westeros, North of “The Wall”:
George R. R. Martin’s yet to be completed fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book of which was published in 1996, was adapted for television as Game of Thrones. In Martin’s fictional world, the northernmost region of “Westeros,” one of the world’s two continents, is the largely unexplored and unmapped wintery domain of the enigmatic “Others,” or “White Walkers.” These supernatural creatures are a deadly threat to mankind, and a giant wall of ice and stone, imbued with magic and overseen by the Sworn Brotherhood of the Night’s Watch, stretches from coast to coast across northern Westeros. The Wall serves to keep the Others at bay, to separate them from the Seven Kingdoms to the south.
Martin’s world, here, is one of very long and brutally cold winters, and he has stated that Canada most closely resembles his vision of northern Westeros.
The Earth Itself as a Frozen World:
John Christopher’s The World in Winter (1962; U.S. title: The Long Winter) envisions a new ice age descending over Europe due to a lessening of solar radiation. Food shortages and starvation ensue, and England descends into anarchy and barbarism, with refugees fleeing to tropical countries, like former colony Nigeria.
Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner (1969) depicts a post-apocalyptic Earth under a thousand feet of ice, with surviving humans navigating the frozen expanses in sailing ships fitted with skis and hunting what has become their primary food source, “ice whales”—whales that have adapted to the temperature change and live atop the ice.
Another story sees an interplanetary narcotics operative working with inhabitants of an extremely frigid alien world to help stop a drug-smuggling operation; this is Hal Clement’s Iceworld (1953). The titular world is, in fact, our own, temperate Earth, but from the agent’s point of view, it is an ice world, given that the sulfur his kind breathes exists as a solid on this planet!
In the Twilight Zone episode “The Midnight Sun” (1961), a New York City artist and her landlady suffer in the heat of rising temperatures as Earth slowly drifts closer to the sun following a realignment of the planet’s orbit. But in a twist typical of the acclaimed television series, this whole scenario is revealed to have been the artist’s fevered dream, and she awakens to find humanity gradually freezing to death as the Earth’s orbital displacement has, in fact, caused the planet to begin spinning away from the sun!
And, the 2006 climactic disaster movie Absolute Zero portrays the results of a sudden shift in the Earth’s magnetic field, causing a drastic drop in temperature to absolute zero in equatorial regions while Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, Alaska, and Northern Europe and Canada are transformed into scorching deserts!
Other examples include the frozen Earth of Snowpiercer, both graphic novel (French: Le Transperceneige, 1982) and screen adaptations (2014, 2020-2024), the Montreal-shot Quintet (film, 1979), and The Day After Tomorrow (film, 2004)
Arcta:
A two-part episode of the original Battlestar Galactica, “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero,” is something of a Guns of Navarone in space! Military engagements with the Cylons are driving the Galactica and Colonial Fleet towards the ice planet Arcta, where the Cylons have set up a trap in the form of a powerful pulsar cannon capable of destroying the Galactica. Apollo leads a special task force to the planet to infiltrate the Cylon garrison and destroy the gun.
Abeth:
Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestors (2017-2019) and Book of the Ice (2020-2022) fantasy trilogies are set on the planet Abeth, a frozen world which orbits a dying red sun. Abeth’s artificial moon serves to refract sunlight onto the planet’s surface along a narrow equatorial corridor, staving off the slowing encroaching walls of glacial ice on either side of this habitable zone, where most of the planet’s inhabitants live.
Niflheim:
In the upcoming dark comedy/sci-fi film Mickey 17 (2025), Niflheim is a hostile ice planet to which Mickey Barnes is dispatched as part of a dangerous colonization mission. Mickey’s desire to get off of Earth had prompted him to sign on as an “Expendable,” a crew member assigned the most hazardous tasks because as an Expendable, he is, essentially, disposable—each time he dies in the performance of his duties, a new version of his body is “printed out,” or cloned, while preserving intact almost all the memories of the previous Mickeys! But when Mickey’s 17th incarnation is erroneously presumed to have died while performing his latest duties, a replacement is produced, Mickey 18, and the rules of the game do not allow “multiples” to co-exist!