John Carpenter’s movie The Thing is but the most famous example of a lineage of remakes and “inspired by” short stories and movies. And claymation movies starring penguins.

Non-fiction: Liv Arnesen, Ann Bancroft & Cheryl Dahle: No Horizon Is So Far (Penguin, 2004)
No Horizon Is So Far is the account of the Norwegian Liv Arnesen and American Ann Bancroft’s expedition to cross the Antarctic continent unsupported. Books about modern Antarctic expeditions like this one are more like sports narratives than exploration, stories about [...]

Novel: Crawford Kilian: Icequake (toExcel, 1998)
What if there was an earthquake on Antarctica? That’s the premise of Crawford Kilian’s disaster novel Icequake, a novel that’s at its best when describing tons of ice moving in chaos. Following all the traditions of genre literature, its at its worst when it has to deal with people.
The premise [...]

Film: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.: The Thing (U.S.A., 2011)
The movie The Thing is a remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing, which is a remake of a 1951 movie called The Thing From Another World, which is based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. I doubt Campbell could have [...]

Non-fiction: Alexa Thomson: Antarctica on a Plate (Random House Australia, 2003)
Many different kinds of people go to Antarctica. Scientists, adventurers and the people who keep the infrastructure running. Often, this last category produces the best books. Alexa Thomson writes about her experiences as a cook at an Antarctic tent camp providing support for a semi-improvised [...]

Art book: Paul D. Miller: The Book of Ice (Mark Batty Publisher, 2011)
Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, created a multimedia performance piece called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica in 2009. This book is a part of that project. It’s kind of a documentation book or an artbook, a scrapbook of graphics and images.
The [...]

Novel: Mat Johnson: Pym (Spiegel & Grau, 2011)
Mat Johnson’s Pym is a stellar example of what an Antarctic novel can be. It’s the story of a black American university man preoccupied with Edgar Allan Poe and issues of race. He gets sacked from his university for failing to serve in the diversity committee, and decides [...]

My roleplaying game Ikuisuuden laakso (The Valley of Eternity) will be published translated into Danish by Rollespilsakademiet. The official publishing date is the 6th of July, 2011.
Here’s the cover of the Danish edition:

Novel: Jules Verne: An Antarctic Mystery (Mondial 2006, orig. 1897)
An Antarctic Mystery is Jules Verne’s sequel to the most enduring classic of Antarctic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe’s novel has spawned a number of sequels by various authors. It follows in the typical pattern of a [...]

Exhibition: American Museum of Natural History: Race to the End of the Earth (2010)
I was visiting New York over the holidays, and there was an exhibition about the race between Scott and Amundsen to reach the South Pole at the American Museum of Natural History.
The most interesting parts of the exhibition are the various items [...]

Non-fiction: Richard E. Byrd: Discovery (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935)
Discovery is Richard Byrd’s account of his second big Antarctic expedition. The difference between this and accounts of the expeditions of Scott and Amundsen is striking, even when the difference in time is not so long. Amundsen used dogs, Byrd uses tractors and flies around in an [...]

Non-fiction: Herbert G. Ponting: The Great White South (Cooper Square Press, 2001, orig. 1921)
This is yet another account of Scott’s doomed final Antarctic expedition, this time by the photographer Herbert Ponting. Ponting is one of the two famous photographers of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Frank Hurley is the other one, and while Ponting’s [...]

TV series: Blizzard - Race to the Pole (U.K. 2006)
Blizzard is a six episode documentary tv series about an attempt to recreate the race to the South Pole. It features two teams, a British team and a Norwegian team. Both use the same equipment as Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott used, eat the same [...]

Novel: Thomas Keneally: The Survivor (Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1969)
Thomas Keneally’s The Survivor is the second Antarctic novel by the same author featured in this blog. The first was Victim of the Aurora. It’s the story of an aging university man who was the only survivor of an ill-fated Australian Heroic Age -expedition. It’s a [...]

Check out Graham Racher’s photo of a penguin skulking about the sewers of Cape Town, South Africa:

Clearly, the photographer has surprised it in the middle of some devious act.