And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :
Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.
But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:
The latest cinematic version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth opens this Friday, staring the ever-likeable Brendan Frasier. Frasier’s character, (Professor Trever Anderson), his nephew and local Icelandic guide find themselves having hair-raising adventures as they voyage through underground seas and landscapes populated with all manner of bizzare plants and animals. Verne’s original book was published in 1864, a time when quite a few people took very seriously the idea that the Earth was hollow–and inhabited. In this they were inspired by a scientific proposal by Edmund Halley (of Halley’s comet fame) that turned out to be not completely off the mark.
The 
