The Antarctic: an anthology of the finest writing about the Arctic and the Antarctic

The ends of the earth #2

by Francis Spufford (Editor), Elizabeth Kolbert (Series Editor), Douglas Mawson (Contributor)

"The Antarctic" features an international mix of classic first-person accounts of exploration, literary travelogues and works of cultural history, natural science and fiction about the South Pole. Contributors include British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese and Russian explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Apsely Cherry-Garrard, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd and Fouglas Mawson; novelists such as H.P. Lovecraft, Diane Ackerman, Jenny Diski and Kim Stanley Robinson and popular travel writers such as Sara Wheeler. It is published alongside the companion volume, "The An Anthology", edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel, Environment, Science, Biology, Nature

281 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Then in 2023 I returned to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stood on the banks of the Mississippi. I was aiming for something like a classic black and white movie, except one you never saw, because it came from another history than our own. It won the Sidewise Award for alternate history. And now (2025/6) I've written a historical fantasy, "Nonesuch", set during the London Blitz, where as well as German bombs the protagonist Iris needs to deal with time-travelling fascists, and the remnants of Renaissance magic, preserved in the statues of the burning city. As writers of fantasy, I like C S Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley, Tamsyn Muir, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Addison. If you like them, you may like this.

Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to the Dean of an Anglican cathedral in eastern England, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London.

Reviews

[Brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked reading about a place from multiple perspectives and time periods. The stories started out with the first explorers and were very telling of how difficult it was to sustain life in Antarctica. The writing was pure and the descriptions of the landscape filled my mind's eye with beautiful pictures. The latter stories were told by people looking to escape from society in order to 'find themselves' in a foreign environment. Unfortunately, they also painted a picture of an Antarctica polluted by man. Overall, this book was very interesting and told me a bit about a place I know very little of.

[Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

somehow better than the arctic — I basically spent all of this book crying about scott

[Ira Therebel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antarctic, the wildest place on Earth. When I think about it what comes to my mind is undisturbed nature, mystery, incredible cold and adventure. And this book brings all of it and a little bit more.

This is an amazing collection from various authors. This are writings talking about Antarctic starting from the times over hundred years ago when people were just beginning to discover it until our days when people research with modern equipment and even can go there as tourists. Those are all different experiences from people with different interests and attitude and combined they give us a very complex and complete picture of Antarctica. An amazing selection indeed.

There are a couple of fiction works, both sci fi, which is a great genre for this scenery. The rest are all non fiction. It is amazing to read about people sharing their experiences. Their diaries of times they were discovering this continent are so vivid. I can see it and I can feel it. Even though all those men were very courageous I personally feel a desperation when reading it and picturing myself in their place. I love reading the books about this continent, but it is unthinkable for me to spend months outside there, sleeping in a tent, fight through the blizzards, being frost bitten and never have really warm feet. This book is the closest I will ever come to living this adventures and it did an excellent job.

[Christina Dudley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of Antarctica writing excerpts. The first half of the book, dealing with the explorers and the heroic age, was fabulous (five stars), the second half couldn't help but be a let-down, although I enjoyed the fictional bits better than the essay by the whiny woman in her bunk and the fellow who lost me with his talk of particles in the water.

Recommended for all lovers of Scott, Amundsen, Cherry-Garrard, Shackleton, and their ilk!

[John Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Living in one of the coldest places in the United States, I have no plans on being a polar explorer, but it is sometimes nice to read about these places and see how people endured in places colder than where I live. This is the first half of a paired set of anthologies that look at the writings on the two polar areas. The book includes chapters by some of the early explorers and ends with a look at life in Antarctica now. The writing was good and it gives a good picture of the continent.