If the deadpan declaration of a new “People’s Republic” on the ice hooked you, Kavan’s razor-cold world will feel eerily familiar. In Ice, an unnamed narrator pursues a fugitive woman through collapsing, glaciated territories while shadowy authorities tighten control—an echo of the way improvised statecraft and shifting loyalties play out on the Antarctic fringe. The wintry desolation, elusive truths, and hypnotic, dreamlike logic mirror the disorienting nation-building and exile you enjoyed.

If you loved being kept off-balance by a narrator whose version of events feels suspect—especially amid absurd bureaucracy and crackpot ideology—The Third Policeman is your next rabbit hole. Its nameless narrator stumbles through a countryside where police enforce impossible laws and logic loops like the ones that make founding a "republic" on a chunk of ice somehow plausible. You’ll savor the same mix of deadpan authority and creeping unreliability.

If the farcical statecraft—proclaiming a nation, issuing grandiose titles, outfoxing officials—made you grin, Catch-22 sharpens that edge. Heller’s Yossarian battles a military rulebook that eats its own tail, much like the diplomatic and administrative nonsense surrounding a so-called people’s republic on the world’s last empty continent. The circular logic, gallows humor, and razor satire of power will hit the same pleasure centers.

If the scrappy, ad hoc politicking—where a few determined obsessives can conjure a ‘country’ out of ice and audacity—held you rapt, Greene’s Saigon will feel like the warmer mirror. Fowler and Pyle’s maneuvering shows how ideals, covert aid, and naïveté collide to make and unmake states. The backroom deals, propaganda, and moral fallout rhyme with the diplomatic gambits that swirled around your Antarctic upstarts.

If the appeal was riding shotgun with a shambling anti-hero whose outsized theories spark ridiculous civic projects—up to and including inventing a ‘republic’—Ignatius J. Reilly is your man. His pompous manifestos, doomed crusades, and accidental chaos in New Orleans echo the quixotic bravado and comic fallout of founding a nation at the bottom of the world.