Landscape can be far much more than just a passive setting into which the characters are dropped. It can be the major driver of the story. EJ Swift's Osiris shows us a world where global warming has melted the Antarttic ice and forced the remnant human population into cities built in the waters. The city defines who people are in that world. They are either privileged Citizens, or lowlife westerners. The haves and have-nots are physically divided by their city. This is not a place where it is easy to be upwardly mobile.
In Frank Herbert's Dune the author created the desert environs of Arrakis. The sand, and the Fremen who live in it, powerfully shape the story. Then there's Katherine Kerr's Polar City books. There the planet is far too near to its sun for people to be out in the day. Life takes place at night in Polar City. In Sarah Crossan's Breathe the landscape is the story. People cluster in the city, the only place where there's enough oxygen to breathe. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when we cut down all the trees.
In Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books cities take mobile form, trundling about the landscape. And they've become predatory, eating up smaller cities. And Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee is a world of cold, snow, and ice, its colonists drawn from Earth tribes who lived in such environments here,
In all these stories the landscape is a character in its own right, a powerful one that shapes and dictates what the human characters in the stories do. Landscape can be so much more than pretty views.
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