History DeathWorld / Literature

* ''Literature/TheBrokenEarth'': The Stillness isn't kind in the best of times due to its unstable and rather abusive tectonic instability. Every so often, a "Fifth Season" occurs, devouring civilization and plunging the world into darkness for years at a time. The flora and fauna of the Stillness have learned to adapt to these cycles. ''Literature/TheFifthSeason'' shows a harmless family dog that turns into a carnivorous beast during the season. ''Literature/TheObeliskGate'' shows harmless water-hoarding insects turn into "boil bugs", searing hot insects that burrow into human skin, searing flesh the whole way in.

*** Jinx is a planet-sized moon pulled into an extreme oval shape by the gravity of the gas giant that it orbits, which causes its atmosphere to pool around its mid- and low latitudes. At its equator, there's a swampy ocean covered by an unsurvivably thick atmosphere. Around it are the two livable bands that the probes found, where the locals live. The eastern and western poles project clear out of the atmosphere. Even in the habitable parts, Jinx has an extremely high gravity that causes even its high grav-adapted people to die early due to heart problems.

* The version of Mars portrayed in the ''Literature/JohnCarterOfMars'' books by Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs qualifies. Due to an ecological catastrophe in the distant past, the planet is a near-desert, with an atmosphere that is only breathable because of an eons-old "atmosphere factory" that almost no one knows how to fix if it breaks. Just about every type of fauna is carnivorous, and they're all huge. To make matters worse, in order to keep their populations under control, the various humanoid natives have a culture the causes them to exist in a constant state of perpetual warfare, consider assassination and kidnapping to be respectable and honorable professions, and fight duels at the drop of a hat. And the non-humanoid natives make many AlwaysChaoticEvil races seem friendly.
** Among those humanoid natives, ''one individual in a thousand'' dies a natural death. 98 percent are killed violently, and the remaining two percent voluntarily go on a last pilgrimage down a sacred river [[spoiler:where they are eaten, or sometimes enslaved.]]

* The ''Kronos Rising'' series has Diablo Caldera, a deep saltwater lake filled with Cretaceous fauna that survived the K/T extinction. The top predator is [[{{Kaiju}} Kronosaurus imperator]], a colossal pliosaur species that decimates the oceans when introduced, and most of the other wildlife is also horrendously deadly.
* The planet Moros from Douglas Hill's ''Literature/LastLegionary'' series. The extremely hostile nature of the planet is the reason the Legionaries of Moros are so capable and therefore so in demand as mercenaries.
* In the ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' novels by Creator/EEDocSmith, there are more than a few such worlds. The most inhospitable of the lot is Trenco. The ''entire atmosphere'' liquifies at night and vaporizes again within a minute of dawn. The calmest winds are only about half the speed of sound; the bad ones are much worse. Sheet lightning is constant. The ultra-powerful magnetic field interacts with the magnetic-field-amplifying substances in the atmosphere and the sheet lightning to generate ''space warps'' that prevent light from traveling in a straight line for more than a few yards. ''Every living thing'' is mobile and carnivorous (one scene has a plant being eaten, the plant eater being eaten by a carnivore, and the carnivore being eaten ''by the original plant'', all at once! Then the whole lot [[AlwaysABiggerFish gets swallowed by the planet's largest predator]]), not to mention spawned from microscopic spores that pervade the gaseous atmosphere so that ''any'' foray requires a serious delousing afterwards to prevent internal contamination. And yet everyone wants to come here...because the plants here are the only source of the series' most FantasticDrug: thionite. Bandits want to harvest the plants, process them into the drug, and sell them to a crazed market. So the Galactic Patrol are here to stop them, and because of the wacko atmosphere, only races with [=ESP=], like Rigellians, can operate effectively here.

* In ''Literature/LordOfMysteries'', the Forsaken Land of the Gods where the City of Silver is situated is this, being a death world in a setting that is ''already'' very dangerous due to being inspired by Lovecraft and the SCP Foundation. Anyone in the Forsaken Land of the Gods who is in complete darkness for more than five seconds dies horribly, usually getting replaced with an evil doppelganger - and there is ''no sun''; the only natural illumination is the constant lightning strikes, meaning that keeping constant lights burning everywhere is a matter of life and death. On top of this, the dead in the vicinity of the City of Silver rise as horrifying monsters even if they die of natural causes. This can only be abated by a blood relative slaying them before their natural demise. On top of this, every place outside the city is filled with all manner of horrible nightmare creatures, often intelligent ones that want to kill people and take their place.

* In ''Literature/LordOfTheMysteries'', the Forsaken Land of the Gods where the City of Silver is situated is this, being a death world in a setting that is ''already'' very dangerous due to being inspired by Lovecraft and the SCP Foundation. Anyone in the Forsaken Land of the Gods who is in complete darkness for more than five seconds dies horribly, usually getting replaced with an evil doppelganger - and there is ''no sun''; the only natural illumination is the constant lightning strikes, meaning that keeping constant lights burning everywhere is a matter of life and death. On top of this, the dead in the vicinity of the City of Silver rise as horrifying monsters even if they die of natural causes. This can only be abated by a blood relative slaying them before their natural demise. On top of this, every place outside the city is filled with all manner of horrible nightmare creatures, often intelligent ones that want to kill people and take their place.

** [[Literature/JediAcademyTrilogy Kessel]] is actually more of a really big asteroid instead of a real planet. It's a PenalColony where people sentenced by Imperials go to serve their term, however long that takes. Huge plants (of the factory type, not the living type) constantly refine rock into gas so you don't need a space suit, but the atmosphere is still very thin and unbreathable, meaning you do need a mask. Inside dwellings, [[Literature/XWingSeries Corran mentions]] that there's enough atmosphere to breathe, but a reek of burned plastic makes him reach for the mask again. Inside the mines there is mostly working air support, but the crystals that are mined there are extremely reactive to any light, so all convicts/slaves have to work in total darkness. And only the guards are given nightvision devices, so it makes guarding easier. And the stuff they're mining? It's produced by gigantic energy-eating spiders. Even with the ContinuityReboot turning Kessel into more of a planet, it's still very desolate and the miners are still mining for a substance that is used in producing a dangerous drug [[NoOSHACompliance without safety equipment that would protect them from exposure]].

* The [[AlternateTimeline alternate Earth]] of the ''Literature/{{Destroyermen}}'' series. The series takes place mainly in the islands of southeast Asia (the Phillipines, Borneo, Malaysia, etc.), so you're in the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire Ring of Fire]], meaning there's occasional earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The dinosaurs never went extinct on this Earth, so on land, you've got carnivorous dinosaurs and other reptiles with too many teeth, including an intelligent human-sized lizard species called the Grik that serves as the series' BigBad. One island has a sapient amphibian race that doesn't take kindly to intruders. Another has a kudzu-like plant that reproduces by sprouting roots inside critters that get scratched by it. At sea, there are any number of voracious predatory fish species (the most prevalent being basically piranhas [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SALTWATER!]]-]), "mountain fish" that can eat ships, and hurricanes that can be worse than those on Earth. And to spice things up - the phenomenon known as Squall constantly transfer new species from other world with different evolution, thos turning the ecosystem into really horrible mess of species with completely different origins and their decendants. The alternate Earth isn't so horrible as to prevent organized societies, however.

** The planet Kolnar from [=McCaffrey=] and Creator/SMStirling's ''Literature/TheCityWhoFought''. A volcanic, radioactive, heavy gravity nightmare world, in orbit around a sun with a spectral category of blinding. Colonized by a particularly nasty group of prisoners, they evolved into nigh-unkillable superhumans. It's no help that said natives have a nuclear war once every generation -- and they get their weapons-grade nuclear material by ''hunting'' a creature best described as a jet-propelled submarine with fangs. And that's one of the nice critters on the planet.

** Even two of the three habitable planets from the heroine's home system aren't particularly healthy. Gryphon([[FantasyCounterpartCulture a local equivalent of Scotland]]) has a really vicious climate and most of its land is mountainous; while Sphinx, the sort-of-Ireland (Honor's birthplace, that is) is a {{heavyworld|er}} (1.6 ''g'') with a year thirty-six months long, extremely cold (it's actually only habitable due to an extremely active carbon cycle) and ''lots'' of [[EverythingTryingToKillYou pretty nasty wildlife]].

* Creator/MercedesLackey's ''Literature/HeraldsOfValdemar'': Another case of "Biome the rest of the planet avoids" are the Pelagirs, aka the Pelagir Hills and Pelagiris Forest. Created by the Cataclysm at the end of the Mage Wars, the background {{mana}} has been high enough and erratic enough to do what other genres [[ILoveNuclearPower ascribe to radiation]] for the past two thousand years. It shows, even ignoring the intentionally magebuilt creatures running free from the end of the aformentioned magewars, with some of the most [[WhiteMagic utterly benign]] areas having plants that try to feel those travelling nearby as if they were blind people or uproot themselves to flee when someone even ''thinks'' about setting a campfire. In the places where Red In Tooth And Claw(tm) prevails (the vast majority), [[FromBadToWorse it's even worse]].

** Earth itself is considered a Death World in his series ''Literature/TheDamned'', by a coalition of alien races whose worlds all have low gravity, low tectonics, practically no axial tilt (preventing violent weather) and few true predators. The average unskilled couch-potato human is more than a match for their trained soldiers. Trained Earth military personnel, especially special-operations types, are essentially incarnate demigods of death by alien standards.

** Salusa Secundus. As of the first novel, only about half of those born on Salusa live past puberty. Salusa Secundus is the home world for the feared Imperial Sardukar. One of the reasons they are so feared and elite is that simply surviving long enough to be recruited makes you a badass by default.

** The ''Literature/ColdfireTrilogy'' features Gerald Tarrant spending several human lifetimes to ''build'' a Death World ecology in his lands with careful planning and study, as well as at least one example of others trying the same stunt ''minus'' the careful planning and study. As the others are mostly adolescents, HilarityEnsues. And the planet itself in that trilogy is ''already'' a Death World (at least for humans) - the place is so magical that dreams literally come true, including (''especially'') the nightmares. Tarrant just made his bit of it [[UpToEleven even more extreme]].

** Aliens classify habitable planets from 1-10; a class 10 world is a deathworld, considered so hostile to intelligent life due to all the bizarre weather patterns, predators, and horrific diseases that the mere possibility of anything intelligent evolving on one is dismissed outright. [[UpToEleven Earth is a class 12.]] Humans therefore are physically and mentally superior to everybody else in the galaxy without knowing it. To a human, scrubbing the enamel-eating bacteria out of their mouths is a normal start to the day, checking their boots for venomous creatures before putting them on is common sense, and bathing in the carcinogenic Ultraviolet rays of their sun is a recreational activity. The rest of the galaxy consider humans to be terrifying and strange.

* Frank Herbert's ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'': Arrakis is [[SingleBiomePlanet one massive desert]] full of {{Sand Worm}}s that will probably eat you if dehydration or the Fremen (whose women and children are a match for Sardaukar) don't kill you first. At least until [[GodEmperor Leto II]] terraforms it, only to change it back 4000 years later because without the worms there is no natural source of [[SpiceOfLife Spice]].
** There is also Salusa Secundus. As of the first novel, only about half of those born on Salusa live past puberty. Salusa Secundus is the home world for the feared Imperial Sardukar. One of the reasons they are so feared and elite is that simply surviving long enough to be recruited makes you a badass by default.

* ''Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem'': Due to its chaotic orbit around three suns, Trisolaris is a ''nasty'' place to live. When it orbits any one sun, it goes into a Stable Era, during which conditions are actually pretty mild. However, the rest of the time it's being kicked around like a football during Chaotic Eras, where it alternates between broiling heat and freezing cold with absolutely no rhyme or reason at all. On particularly close or distant passes, the surface may turn molten or the atmosphere may freeze. Sometimes, the three suns align in a straight line with Trisolaris at one end, causing everything on the surface to literally fall into the nearest sun. Due to the eponymous three-body problem, all of this happens ''completely'' at random, and cannot be predicted at all. The only reason anything lives there at all is that native life adapted to dehydrate indefinitely and then come back when conditions got better. And they're the lucky ones; their system used to have twelve planets, but the other eleven fell into the suns eons ago. This hellish existence and their world's days being numbered are the reason for the Trisolarans invasion Earth.

* ''Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem'': Due to its chaotic orbit around three suns, Trisolaris is a ''nasty'' place to live. When it orbits any one sun, it goes into a Stable Era, during which conditions are actually pretty mild. However, the rest of the time it's being kicked around like a football during Chaotic Eras, where it alternates between broiling heat and freezing cold with absolutely no rhyme or reason at all. On particularly close or distant passes, the surface may turn molten or the atmosphere may freeze. Sometimes, the three suns align in a straight line with Trisolaris at one end, causing everything on the surface to literally fall into the nearest sun. Due to the eponymous three-body problem, all of this happens ''completely'' at random, and cannot be predicted at all. The only reason anything lives there at all is that native life adapted to dehydrate indefinitely and then come back when conditions got better. This hellish existence and their world's days being numbered are the reason for the Trisolarans invasion Earth.