The Ice by Stephen J. Pyne (University of Iowa : $37.50; 428 pp., illustrated : Overflight by Charles Neider (New Horizon: $14.95; 218 pp.)

Antarctica is like space: a baffling place, only slightly understood. People who go there are jolted by the experience; many have trouble sorting it into their previous conceptions of life and the planet. Writers first struggle to describe the eeriness, the excitement, and the grandeur of a landscape that is so different that most metaphors are meaningless; and then they try to place it within the literature of a civilization whose entire world has always been green. Their efforts often fail.

But Antarctica is slowly becoming a part of our world, politically, scientifically, and, at last, in literature. These two books are part of that process. The first, “The Ice,” is no less than a landmark of Antarctic literature. The second, “Overflight” is a novel that is promoted as landmark but isn’t. Yet the two books together remind once again how difficult it is to assimilate a place that is truly new into our set habits of mind.

The importance of “The Ice” is its grand ambition. It is the first work to attempt to find for Antarctica a place in the culture of the world.

Although Stephen Pyne spent three months in Antarctica, this is not a personal description. The subtitle “A Journey to Antarctica” is accurate as a metaphor only; there are no travels described in this book. This is, instead, a long essay, intent on generalization. Its chapters alternate between descriptions of kinds of ice--sea ice, ice shelves, glaciers, the ice plateau--and histories of human interaction with the continent--exploration, literature, earth science, and geopolitics.

Other recent books--”A Pole Apart”, by Philip Quigg, and “The Seventh Continent” by Deborah Shapley--have covered similar raw material. But this is different. The other books are documentary, placing the facts where they fall; Pyne seeks, sorts, arranges, and asserts, always finding meanings. He places the continent in a context of the modernist movement, of the many goals of the age of exploration, of the dramatic development of tectonic plate theory, of the new age of international politics. The Ice, he says, capitalizing it, is an earth emblem for our times.

Pyne’s writing is elaborate and often unnecessarily complex. For instance, in describing the way loose rocks on the surface are arranged into patterns by the steady influence of frost, Pyne writes: “Detrital surfaces are organized into patterned ground, regolith counterparts to the atmospheric optics that geometrize the sky.” Pyne’s writing can be poetic in its imagery: the highest area of the great ice plateau is “the cold quiescent eye of the polar vortex.” And he has a strong sense of rhythm and rhetoric. But most of the time he seems trapped in an over-ripe jungle of words; if he would hew about him for a while, using as a machete a basic guide to simplicity and clarity like Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” people would be able to see him better.

But his theme has power. It rolls through the brush like a tank. What does this place, The Ice, mean to us folk of the green landscape? Pyne asks (though never that clearly). His answer is, excuse me, chilling. The Ice is an intellectual sink, a white emptiness, “the sum of its negations,” “less interesting for what it contains than for what it lacks,” “a geography of nihilism,” “a geographic solipsism.” In his section on literature Pyne describes some of the monsters and strange societies that fictional characters found in Antarctica, but none could be more spooky than his own image of a landscape of nothingness that drains even the aurora from the sky. Pyne’s earth emblem is a blank white mask into which the world stares, and sees reflections.

Perhaps it is natural for a man whose thought and language are ornate to be discomfited by a place whose surface, at least, appears so starkly simple. Whatever its personal origin, however, Pyne’s view is compelling, and is strongly supported by the patterns of geography and history that he draws here in a manner a bit like the relentless arranging of stones by frost. “The Ice” is a powerful and important book. Anyone who cares about the nature of our globe and its landscape and civilization should read it.

But one should not be convinced by it. Personally, I disagree. It reminds me of asking a scientist at McMurdo Station how she could work in what I described as a barren landscape. “Barren?” she chided me gently. “I can see that you’re not a microbiologist.” Too, I have been endlessly enthralled by the very places about which Pyne says “the scene palls and ultimately disappoints.”

Pyne’s theory of the emblematic emptiness of Antarctica is ultimately provincial: The Ice, like some ignorant aboriginal, is nothing until we give it our own values. “A civilization rich in information, full of aesthetic traditions and landscape arts, will see much in the polar plateau because it can bring much to it,” he writes. “... Much has to be brought to this information sink so that something may be taken away.” Pyne would say that both my appreciation for the landscape and the microbiologist’s perception of its teeming tiny life were created by the cultural and scientific knowledge we brought with us. I would argue that to find the special gifts of any new place one must go there informed by one’s own culture, but also free from its preconceptions.

Pyne, I think, demands that Antarctica fit within the limits of Western civilization. His bleak view of the place is a result of an unintentionally snobby kind of self-consciousness. Pyne never uses the first person singular, but the whole book is focused so intently on human culture that it denies the quality of the place that makes it so exciting: its utter newness to the mind.

And that self-consciousness, alas, is the one characteristic that “The Ice” shares with “Overflight.”

Charles Neider is the author of two substantial nonfiction books about the continent, both based on his own extensive travels there. He’s one of the few people who might have been in the position to make a truly Antarctic novel. That, indeed, is how he thinks of “Overflight”; he praises himself in advance for writing the first novel “with a completely authentic Antarctic background.” But while the background he creates here has the color and shape of Antarctica, it is only as real in the book as a painted stage set, and less important. Like Pyne, Neider comes to the Antarctic with a lot of baggage, but where Pyne brings a magic kit full of cultural attachments, Neider just carries a big magnifying glass with which to examine the dirt under his own fingernails.

“Overflight” is the fictionalized story of two crashes: The 1979 wreck of a New Zealand tourist DC-10 on Mt. Erebus, in which all 275 people on board died; and a nonfatal helicopter accident on the slopes of the same mountain some years before, which Neider himself experienced.

The central character is Joel Stevenson, a professor of American history at the University of Virginia. All the rest of the people in the book are one-dimensional, with virtually no abiding characteristics. (Except that the women who fall into Stevenson’s arms--and even try to rape him, stud that he is--tend to have muscular legs.) But you get to know Stevenson well. Too well. He is insufferably self-centered and arrogant, characteristics he protects with great pulpy masses of guilt. Stevenson is invited to give a lecture on the tourist airliner, where, with a brief view out the window and a glance around the cockpit, he amazingly comprehends the approaching disaster. After warning the pilots without effect he puts on the survival clothing he has conveniently brought with him and proceeds to ride out the otherwise fatal crash.

Back in McMurdo Station Stevenson develops new layers of guilt, becomes a world celebrity, and goes back up the mountain in a helicopter with his girl, where the machine crashes and two men die. During the rescue Stevenson, left to himself for a short time, is visited by several importunate ghosts, among them the shades of his mother and of Robert Falcon Scott, the British explorer who died returning from the South Pole. “Judge us fairly, Joel,” Scott begs of Stevenson, as if praying.

Neider is a noted author and student of Mark Twain’s work. Many of his scenes are effective in their compilation of detail. It is possible that he is drawing a picture of this unhappy man, Stevenson, with literary subtlety, showing the disintegration of an over-stressed personality. Unfortunately, a reading of his nonfiction about Antarctica dashes the hope that he’s being that subtle. The Charles Neider you meet in “Beyond Cape Horn” and “The Edge of the World” is a lot like Joel Stevenson, though less scattered and guilty. Images, anecdotes and attitudes leap almost intact from the pagesof the non-fiction books into “Overflight.” Dave Bresnahan, an official, becomes the slightly unpleasant “Dave Breslin.” There is a Van in both the real and fictional helicopter crashes. In “Overflight” and “Beyond Cape Horn” a 9-year-old Husky named Osman dies unpleasantly. An interview with Sir Charles Wright, a member of Scott’s team, becomes an interview with Sir Henry S. Wild, who tells Stevenson (as Wright did not tell Neider), that Scott looked haunted in death. It is as if Neider is adjusting his memory in fiction to give it meaning. But if Neider is trying to make Stevenson a version of himself, I hope he failed, because where I think Neider wants to create a strong character, he instead paints a sad portrait of a self-centered man trying to assert his own central importance in a world that ignores him.

In the end Stevenson leaves Antarctica with a grand delusion: He is convinced that he survived to tell the world that Mt. Erebus itself is an evil spirit, “a hypnotizing, seductive, malevolent force at the world’s nether end, the planetary anus spewing the fires of earth’s indigestion.” (Take that, Stephen J. Pyne, you and your silent wastes!)

This is not a joke. Stevenson--and Neider--seem serious about it. Neider either lacks the art to make Stevenson clearly a deluded soul, or he half believes this himself. The evil nature of Erebus, Stevenson says, caused the crashes. The mountain was responsible, too, for the haunted look on Scott’s face and for his blunders on the way to the pole; his one mistake was to build his base too near the volcano. Roald Amundsen was able to get to the pole first, Stevenson goes on, because he started his trek far from Erebus.

Neider’s anal, evil Erebus and Pyne’s cold stare of The Ice are similar, although the first is as absurd as the second is powerful. Both are artificial projections onto a continent whose real nature is far more complex and mysterious than these images allow. “Overflight” proves the idea that Pyne expresses with much more strength: That the notions and visions and emotions and ideas that you discover on the great white sheet of Antarctica are often the ones you brought with you on the plane. You recoil or you smile; when you bring self-consciousness to The Ice, what you see in the ice is yourself.