INTRODUCTION There is a longstanding conception of the Earth''s polar regions that there is nothing much there but vast expanses of featureless ice, fear- some weather, a few solitary wandering bears in the Arctic, huddles of penguins at the other end, above them the glorious Auroras (Borealis at the north; Australis at the south) and very few--if any--signs of human culture. The poles in this tradition represent the absence or even negation of civilisation and politics: the last great wildernesses where nature continues in its purest form. It''s an alluring narrative, even if (as we shall see) it isn''t true. When Mary Shelley''sFrankenstein(1818) reaches its climax among the far north''s "eternal frosts" with the angst-ridden scientist pursuing his creature on an "almost endless journey across the mountainous ices of the ocean", the Arctic setting is an exploration of intensities of the heart and mind as much as it is an account of a physical place (which Shelley in any case never herself visited). The same pattern holds at the far south. Edgar Allan Poe imagines a similar landscape to Shelley''s in his 1833 Antarctic tale "MS. Found in a Bottle". As Poe''s unnamed narrator takes refuge on the ghostly vesselDiscovery, he records the ship running further and further towards "stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe".

The narrator experiences a deepening sen- sation of horror at what might await, but nonetheless acknowledges that "a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death". At Poe''s historical moment in the early nineteenth century, when little was known of the Antarctic continent (and like Shelley, Poe was writing about a place he''d never seen), the narrator''s horror is balanced by the glamour of the unknown, the apprehension that he is "hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge--some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction". The Romantic imagination of the poles works through an intriguing mixture of emotions: the dread and the desire which reinforce rather than oppose each other, and which together emphasise the dual function of extremity as existential as much as geographical. Shelley''s and Poe''s early depictions of polar regions remain influ- ential, even after two centuries of Arctic and Antarctic exploration have threatened to bring such flights of literary imagination back to the ground of sober fact. Conventionally, the poles remain the blank space on which literary and cinematic fantasies--some of which are very odd indeed--can be imposed. H. P. Lovecraft''s formative ver- sion of weird fiction draws on polar regions to a significant extent, mainly the Antarctic world which in "At the Mountains of Madness" (1931) appears as a "frightful gateway into hidden spheres of dream".

Dan Simmons''sThe Terror(2007) shows the allure of Arctic horror lingering into the twenty-first century, even if the novel''s supernatural elements rely on a historical setting in one of the far north''s great mysteries. The disappearance of Sir John Franklin''s 1845 expedi- tion to navigate the Northwest Passage--the long-sought sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans--was a real-life Victorian horror story. What dire fate befell the crew after the two ships, the Erebusand theTerror,were abandoned in the ice in 1848? The evi- dence of cannibalism that was presented by an 1854 search party was rejected with jingoistic indignation: British gentlemen donoteat each other, not even the common sailors (though actually they probably did, even if scurvy, cold and poisoning from canned food played their part in the crews'' demises too). Simmons inevitably throws a monster into the dramatic mix to hammer home the Arctic''s Gothic credentials. The historical setting--think too of Michelle Paver''s 2010 Arctic ghost storyDark Matter, set in the 1930s--distances the strange happenings from the rationalising gaze of modern science. Fiction reveals a consistent longing to hold onto the poles'' other- ness, even if it has to go back in time to do so. It''s not enough for the poles to be colder and further away than other places (though that of course depends where you are to start with); there needs to be some deeper weirdness at work in these extreme latitudes. In the literary history of the Arctic and Antarctic continents there are some striking motifs, some of which seem curious today.

For a start, the weather at the poles isn''t always what you would expect. Shelley''s narrator in the opening sections ofFrankenstein, the pomp- ous Arctic adventurer Robert Walton, can''t help but wonder if the expectation of "frost and desolation" will turn out to be misguided and that instead he''ll discover a place where "snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe". The idea that the poles may--contrary to expectation--contain open seas and a tropical climate has a long history and takes its place among a variety of eldritch geographical speculations. In one tradition, dating back to the fourteenth century, the poles are sites of whirlpools that lead down into a hollow earth: a serious hypothesis that was embraced enthusiastically by novelists, to the extent that hollow earth fiction comprises its own subgenre. Lost races and civilisations abound, both within the planet''s imag- ined interior and on the surface of the poles. Poe''s 1838 novelThe Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucketis one influential example of a curious polar population. As Pym and his companion Peters head further south they arrive at the island Tsalal, home to a stereotypi- cally savage Black tribe from whom the adventurers escape only to disappear down the Antarctic plughole. It is fitting, perhaps inevitable, that the weird worlds imagined at the poles should be the home to a parallel natural history of fantastic, and in many cases paranormal, creatures.

Some of these beasts spin off from a recognisable polar zoology. The "limitless void" of Lovecraft''s subterranean domain in "At the Mountains of Madness" contains a population of penguins, those familiar Antarctic denizens, though these are "of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in [their] combined albinism and virtual eyelessness". Other creatures of the polar imagination are more outrageous. I''ll save for now the creatures that make it into this volume, but here are some examples from the wider ecosystem of the polar and subpolar weird. Abraham Merritt''s 1918 story "The People of the Pit" follows a group of gold prospectors in Alaska as they reach as lost city of reptilian trees and "monstrous slugs". Jim Kjelgaard''s "The Thing from the Barrens" (1945) pits a remote community of trappers in the far north against an invisible predatory duck monster. Prehistoric creatures linger in confirmation of the tendency to fix the poles into a perpetual past. James de Mille''s Antarctic novelA Strange Manuscript F.