“Ice” came to me from a lot of places.

I was rifling through the school library one day and I came across a little leaflet published by August Derleth that was basically the transcription of a panel discussion he’d moderated at some convention back in the 60’s. It was a bunch of fantasy/sci-fi authors talking about Lovecraft’s work, how it had influenced them, what they’d thought of playing around in his world, and so forth. The only author whose name I remember was Fritz Leiber. 

Someone asked whether any of them actually found Lovecraft scary. Most said no. But Leiber spoke up about when he was young and reading this stuff for the first time, back in the days when people didn’t take the domestication of the environment quite so much for granted, when it still felt like there were distant, unknown places here on Earth.

It made me want to try and recapture that feeling of mystery and the unknown, and I thought the antarctic was a good setting. I’ve been studying anthropology and maritime stuff (where stuff = history, archaeology, etc) for a while now, and ship societies interest me. I’d done some reading the previous term on social interactions between crew and scientists on long research voyages which had stuck in my mind for whatever reason.

The goal was to create a story with a strong atmosphere of menace and mystery, and to play with the idea that maybe we don’t know our world so well as we believe and that there might be consequences for our modern ignorance and complacency. I wanted to play more with some of the ideas and impulses that inspired Lovecraft than with any specific mythos elements.

Also, I was living with a friend in Toronto during a heat wave, and he had no air conditioning. It was nice to be able to think about being somewhere really cold.