Single Biome Planet / Literature

Single-Biome Planets in literature.

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Examples by author:

• Alan Dean Foster:
  • The Humanx Commonwealth series contains several of these: Desert Planet (Jast in Sliding Scales, Pyrassis in Reunion), Ice Planet (Tran-ky-ky in Icerigger, Treetrunk in Dirge), Ocean Planet (Cachalot in Cachalot, Repler in Bloodhype), Jungle Planet (Midworld), Jungle in a Swamp Planet (Fluva in Drowning World), Even Soggier Than Vancouver Pine Forest Planet (Moth in For Love of Mother-Not), etc. He's even got Cave Planet (Longtunnel), No Biochemical Barriers Planet (Quofum), and Vacation Paradise Planet (New Riviera) thrown into the mix. Icerigger notably offers one of the most detailed accounts of natives' physical and technological adaptations to an Ice Planet in fiction.
  • Foster's Star Wars Legends novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye is set on the Swamp Planet Mimban.
• Andre Norton:
  • The Forest Planet Janus in Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus.
  • The Ice Planet in Secret of the Lost Race.
  • The sequel to The Zero Stone, Uncharted Stars, includes an Ice Planet and a City Planet.

Examples by work:

• Animorphs:
  • Played straight for dramatic purposes. One Yeerk in book 6 mutters about the insane number of species Earth has, while the Yeerk character in book 19 is even more impressed with Earth. The Yeerks artificially make the planets they conquer Single Biome Planets because they find millions of species on one planet far too complicated and pointless.
  • Another example that both does and doesn't fit the planet archetypes is Ket, homeworld of The Ellimist. At first glance it looked just like a standard volcanic planet. But it was in fact a low-gravity world with a very dense atmosphere, which allowed for giant crystals to float freely in the atmosphere. The planet's civilisation of winged aliens lived entirely on (and off) those crystals. One character calls it "the rarest of all environments."
  • Played with: the Hork-Bajir homeworld is mostly uninhabitable, but there are a series of foresty valleys around the equator. This is the result of an ancient asteroid impact in the planet's distant past. The Hork-Bajir live in the skyscraper-sized trees, while the floors of the valleys are covered by a mist ("the Deep") filled with monsters. And the Arn, the planet's original native inhabitants.
  • Leera is almost entirely water, with one small continent. The inhabitants are frog-like aliens who spend most of the time underwater; they used to lay their eggs on land, but modern technology makes that unnecessary, which is why they don't mind blowing it the hell up in their war with the Yeerks.
• Bounders:
  • The Tundra Trials is set mostly on the tundra planet Gulaga, whose surface is almost entirely covered in frozen mud and rocks.
  • The Forgotten Shrine is set in an Underwater City on the ocean planet Alkalinia.
• Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise: While averted, for the most part, the planet Solaris is 97% water with several hundred islands making up the only dry land. The name comes from Stanisław Lem's novel, and is lampshaded in-universe, although the first-person titular protagonist points out that this Solaris doesn't have a sentient ocean. The colonists live on those islands and enjoy nice weather (something you wouldn't have on a world that's mostly water). Additionally, the flora and fauna appears to be stuck in the Sillurian Period, meaning there's nothing in the water to threaten humans. Instead, humans have introduced fish (the kind that can be fished, not the kind that can eat you whole) and sea mammals (e.g. dolphins, whales).
• Doctor Who New Adventures: The System in Sky Pirates! comprises an ocean world, a forest world, a desert world and an ice world. However, this is far from the weirdest thing about them, and it's made very clear that The System feels under no obligation to do anything that our universe would consider "making sense".
• Dune:
  • Arrakis, the eponymous world, is a textbook example of a Desert Planet, with the nomadic Fremen and the black market on water. For example, the planet's polar regions are mentioned as a source for water traders. Herbert also explains why a desert world without any forests can maintain the CO2/O2 balance required for humans to survive. (It has to do with the worms, which release oxygen into the atmosphere.) There's a massive amount of detail on the biochemistry, ecosystem and geography in the Appendices that really show he did the research. The reason it's all desert is mostly because the constant movement of the sandworms (which can grow to be hundreds or thousands of meters long and wide and are incredibly strong) means that the crust is being constantly churned into sand.
  • Partially averted in the sequels. As humanity terraforms the planet and the Sandworm population decreases, significant portions of Arrakis become lush temperate forests. And significant portions of the universe, subsequently, become fucked for natural Spice. Be careful what you wish for!
  • There's also Caladan, apparently an Ocean World; Giedi Prime, a polluted city planet; and non-canon Draconis IV, an ice planet.
• Evolution:
  • At several points in the Earth's history, such as in the Jurassic and the Paleocene, its land is entirely covered by immense forests. Jurassic Earth, in particular, is ecologically very uniform due to the joining of the continents having allowed all kinds of beings to migrate, mingle, and outcompete each other until only a select few survived, and cover all the lands until only a uniform, global forest community was left.
  • New Pangaea, a supercontinent which will reassemble 500 million years into the future, is entirely covered by a uniform desert of red dust.
    On this New Pangaea, there were no barriers, no lakes or mountain ranges. Nowadays it didn't matter where you went, from pole to equator, from east to west. Everywhere was the same. And there was dust everywhere. Even the air was full of red dust, suspended there by the habitual sandstorms, making the sky a butterscotch-coloured dome. It was more like Mars than Earth.
• Foundation Series:
  • The planet Trantor is the capital of the Galactic Empire and is a City Planet: its land surface and a significant part of its oceans are completely covered with human buildings. It has a population of 40 billion and its food needs are served by the agricultural output of 20 Farm Planets.
  • Foundation and Empire has two mentions of farm planets: the agricultural planets of the Pleiades and the twenty agricultural planets that supplied food to Trantor.
  • Foundation and Earth features the planet Alpha, which is completely covered by water except for a single (though large) artificially created island.
• Fractured Stars: The aptly-named Frost Moon 3 consists almost entirely of sub-freezing wastelands. Free people live in domes, while prisoners work in underground power plants and mines. The people who run the prisons have engineered robotic predators that look like a cross between a bear and a panther to kill escaped prisoners. There's also some real wildlife, which is kept alive by airdrops of frozen vegetables and meat. The planet Frost Moon 3 orbits is mentioned to be covered in ice.
• Hainish:
  • The Left Hand of Darkness: The planet Winter (otherwise known as Gethen) is, predictably, an Ice Planet. However, what a few different characters observe is that Gethen is actually very similar to Earth, except that the story takes place in the middle of one of the Ice Ages. A native character remarks that the scientists have predicted a rise in temperatures across the planet and a mass melting of the ice. The character observes "I'm glad I won't be around to see that."
  • The Word for World is Forest: While the name would lead one to expect Athshe to be a Forest Planet, it's mostly an Ocean Planet. The only land is a comparatively small archipelago covered in forest. While the native name "Athshe" means "Forest", its colonial name "New Tahiti" reflects its nature as an Ocean Planet dotted with a few islands.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy has a few of these, including Ursa Minor Beta, which has a truly improbable geography of warm oceans and thin sandy strips of land, meaning the entire world is basically luxurious beachfront property. Taken a bit further in that the time of day is always that time on a Saturday afternoon just before the bars close. The absurdity of this is noted, and its citizens tell each other to "have a nice diurnal anomaly." Of course, the series also establishes that in ages past the planet of Magrathea used to craft planets to order for the very rich, so it's entirely possible that these are all custom jobs.
• The History of the Galaxy: Averted, with a few exceptions, although usually only a small part of the planet is described. Erigon is known as an ice world (Ice Planet), and the colonists had to dig in and build subglacial cities in order to survive. After 1000 years, most of the colonists have moved to other worlds. The only ones who are left run the tourism for anyone who still cares to see the ice world. Interestingly, after 1000 years of space exploration, most humans have emigrated from Earth. The oceans have somehow dried up, and are now replaced with lush jungles, effectively turning the planet into a jungle world.
• Hoshi and the Red City Circuit: Cassiopeia Prime is almost entirely covered in ocean. Red City is located on its one island.
• Hyperion Cantos includes several of these: the ecumenopolises of Tau Ceti Center and Renaissance Vector, the ocean planet of Maui-Covenant, the Forest Planet of God's Grove, etc. Because all the planets are connected together in a single WorldWeb this doesn't appear to be a problem, although the ecological absurdity of this becomes a plot point when the network of Farcasters connecting the planets collapse, causing single-city planets to starve... except for Renaissance Vector, which conveniently got its food from Renaissance Minor, an agricultural world in the same system.
• John Carter of Mars: The planet Mars (or "Barsoom") is presented as a borderline version of this, dominated by vast deserts with occasional canals and agricultural "green belts" along them. In the later books, we see other biomes, mostly at the north and south poles, but desert remains the default.
• Known Space:
  • The planet Beanstalk, seen in one Man-Kzin Wars story, is maintained as a pole-to-pole "gardened" Forest Planet by the ancient immortal Bandersnatchi because they just like it that way.
  • In "The Soft Weapon", one of the planets in the Beta Lyrae star system is an "icy little blob of a world", i.e., an Ice Planet.
• The Madness Season: The protagonist at one point looks up archive footage of the Tyr's home planet. He's somewhat unnerved to find endless unbroken kilometers of lush blue plant growth from pole to pole, broken only by oceans teeming with life. It turns out he's only viewing it during a very narrow portion of its solar orbit; nine years out of ten, the planet is either a frozen wasteland as its orbit carries it out to the far reaches of the solar system, or a boiling hellhole as it comes too near the sun. It looks as nice as it does during spring because all the planet's life has to put out as much growth as it can during the brief live periods.
• The Magicians: In The Magician King, Josh describes the worlds he visited in this way. When questioned about it he concedes that he never traveled more than a few miles from his starting location, and has no idea what the rest of the world was like.
• The Martian Chronicles: Parodied in "The Earth Men". Some Earth-astronauts go to Mars, and the local Martians think they're nutters just claiming to be aliens, so the astronauts find themselves locked up in the loony bin. While there, several other loonies claim to be from Earth, and each say that Earth is a "massive jungle planet", a world covered with just oceans, or just desert, etc.
• Night of Masks takes place mostly on a world whose star radiates only in the infra-red.
• Paradox Trilogy: Fishermarch is an ocean planet where the only land is man-made floating islands. Caldswell takes his crew there for vacation. Heaven's Queen also has Atlas 35, a planet which Devi states has been "terraformed to within an inch of its life" in order to be a farm planet where every inch of land is suitable for crop cultivation.
• The Pendragon Adventure: Several Territories qualify. Cloral is an Ocean Planet, Zadaa is a Desert Planet, and Eelong is a Jungle Planet.
  • Cloral currently has one piece of dry land. Eelong is never stated to be completely jungle, the whole book just happens to have taken place in a jungle region. In the expanded works, Denduron is shown to be almost completely covered in ice with only some temperate zones near the equator.
  • Zadaa isn't entirely desert, either. The Rokador Elders blame the drought, which they are actually deliberately causing at Saint Dane's suggestion, in The Rivers of Zadaa on low precipitation levels in a mountainous region to the north of the desert Xhaxhu is located in. Then there's the fact that nobody questions Bobby's Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story of coming from a vast forest region.
• Planescape: In Fire and Dust, the protagonist points out that most people who claim to come from, say, an "ice planet" just came from a polar region of an actually diverse world and have simply never seen the rest of it. Because the setting is focused on travel between the various planes of existence more mundane methods of travel are generally much less common, leading to people not having actually seen most of the planet they live on.
• The Player of Games is set partly on the Fire Planet, which is mostly ocean with one continent ringing the equator. Life there is shaped by a permanent forest fire, which propagates around the world in about a year.
• Averted in Ravenor when the villains speak with Ravenor after he comes through a gate. He has to go back the same way, but he can identify the location: not just the planet, but the actual location, down to a small sector, by the plants he sees.
• Rod Allbright Alien Adventures: Subverted in Aliens Ate My Homework. When the characters are walking through a swamp (on Earth), one of the aliens becomes nostalgic for his home. Rod asks if he comes from a swamp planet, and his companion retorts with "Do you come from a swamp planet?" It takes Rod a second to realize that, just like Earth, Grakker's planet probably has multiple environments.
• The Skeleton Crew story "Beachworld" is a very creepy deconstruction of an all-desert planet.
• The Space Trilogy: Perelandra (i.e., Venus) is (mostly) covered by ocean. And floating islands, inhabited by enchantingly cute and invariably friendly wildlife (even the dragons). It's a lovely place for a holiday (in other words, the exact opposite of its real-life equivalent), and thoroughly worth risking your life beating up Satan with your bare hands in order to protect it. In fairness, Ransom does reflect, on leaving both Malacandra and Perelandra, that he had visited only a tiny area of each planet, so his account isn't meant to imply that either has a uniform terrain. Even in Out of the Silent Planet, Malacandra is shown to have forests, rivers, lakes (or even an ocean), tall mountains...
• Speaker for the Dead: Lusitania is a Forest Planet with a bare handful of species to its name. This is totally justified, though — Precursors terraformed it using a virus to suit their needs.
• Star Trek: Titan: Justified with Droplet. It's an ocean world based upon genuine (and cutting-edge) scientific theories. While most such worlds wouldn't have higher order life, due to a lack of landmass to provide mineral runoff, the novel provides a reasonable explanation for the existence of a complex ecosystem on Droplet. Essentially, the life-cycle of a native plankton aids in bringing heavier elements from the hypersaline depths to the surface.
• In Strata, Marco's species (kung) come from a Flood Planet: between light gravity, a massive moon, and a cool sun it orbits closely, Kung has tides that'd make an Earth tsunami look like a ripple, and a sky so saturated by ocean spray that there's barely one hour in twenty when it's not raining.
• To the Stars: Justified. An imperialistic Earth has terraformed a number of planets (with a custom-made culture as well), each one dedicated to farming, production or mining of one particular resource. The idea being that none of them have the diverse resources needed to launch a revolt.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Referenced in A Civil Campaign when two characters are discussing the planet Barrayar, and one points out that an entire planet being covered in one sort of natural or urban environment isn't exactly a likely prospect.
    "It's not at all what I was expecting, from Barrayar."
    "What were you expecting?"
    "Kilometers of flat gray concrete, I suppose. Military barracks and people in uniform marching around in lockstep."
    "Economically unlikely for an entire planetary surface. Though uniforms, we do have."
  • Beta Colony fits this, being a desert world where the base temperature is "screaming hot", although sports like desert trekking are mentioned, and everyone lives in protective habitats.
  • Komarr fits this description to a degree, as it is a cold world undergoing terraforming, and like Beta, everyone is forced to live within domes.
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Generally averted. All habitable planets have a wide variety of climates, just like Earth. The exception is Poseidon, which is entirely covered in water. However, the ocean surface is pockmarked with organic "mats" — clumps of plant life. The mats serve as platforms for the initial colony, although Marcus eventually builds much more comfortable aerial cities. Oh, and the oceans are home to some nasty (and hungry) lifeforms, such as krakens.
• Xandri Corelel: The first novel is set on Psittaca, which appears to be covered entirely in jungle.

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