10 Best Science Fiction Planets

Shaun Saunders sends in an article from Discovery magazine that I found fascinating. How often do you stop to think about the different worlds that occupy the pages of the stories and novels you read. Well, there is a reason you don't. Most of the worlds are so generic that they don't even warrant more consideration. As the author of this article writes:

• These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds, earthquake worlds, and so on.

And if you think about it, well - that's pretty dead on. But every now and then someone fills in the blanks so to speak and gives us a world that would as the author puts it:

• a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface.

1. Solaris: Stanislaw Lem’s conception of a world so utterly alien that it defies any genuine human comprehension still resonates.
2. Dune: Frank Herbert created a complete ecosytem, deep geological history, and a complex native society to go with his sand covered planet.
3. Annares: Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed featured two worlds, a more-or-less straightforward analog for cold-war era Earth, and the far more interesting Annares, where settlers established an anarcho-syndicate-based society in a bid to be free from authoritarian government.
4. Mote Prime: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, this is the homeworld of the Moties, a species that, due to cosmic happenstance, has been bottled up in its solar system ever since it evolved.
5. LV-426: The dread planet that featured briefly in Alien, and was the location for 1986’s Aliens.
6. Dagobah: From the Star Wars planet making machine Dagobah sticks out for its organic messiness and claustrophobic atmosphere.
7. Lusitania: The setting of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead.
8. Red, Green and Blue Mars: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Beginning in the near future, with the founding of the first permanent outpost on the red planet, and continuing for two centuries as Mars is terraformed.
9. P2: a world orbiting the nearby Barnard’s star, and it is settled by fantastically advanced exiles from the solar system in Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission.
10. Nasqueron: A gas giant, home of the maddeningly unconcerned Dwellers, and location of much of Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist.
    

Now if you were like me, you read down through the list and said "Oh Yeah!" because you remember the yarn and then the world. A few were instantly recognizable, a few were jogged by the article and then well a few just would not have made my cut. For me, some were movie blindness....so I never thought of the Alien world...which is certainly a good choice for the list...but then the same thing happened with Dagobah, I don't think it would have ever made my initial list. For me Dagobah is exactly what this article started with. A world that is merely a place for the characters to interact. Dune is an excellent choice because it worked well in both venues. I would have put Hyperion on the list though and ummm PERN?! Any others? Maybe we could start our own list!

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