The Snow Queen

I don't know why I got away from this book like I did. It shouldn't take that long to read, and it's very, very good.

I love that the main characters in the book are strong women. I love that the world building is fully fleshed out. I love that it's a coming-of-age story that's not weak. I just kinda loved it all.

The story takes place on Tiamat (also, yeah, loving Vinge's use of names), which is a planet in the "Hegemony", that due to an astronomical fluke is "available" to the Hegemony for 150 of every 300 years.

When the Hegemony has access to Tiamat, the techno-forward, environment destorying "Winters" rule the planet (complete with it's Winter Queen) and during the inaccessible time, the primitive nature worshiping "Summers" rule. show more

This story takes place at the time of transition. The Winter Queen will do whatever it takes to keep her power, the Hegemony will do what it needs to to make sure that the transition happens (for reasons that are revealed, brilliantly, in the book). Arienrhod is the titular Snow Queen, a hard and scheming woman, who is not one dimension (for a refreshing change). Moon, the second of three main characters, is a product of Arienrhod's scheming, she is a Summer, who has the calling to become a sibyl. Thanks to her calling, she must end her relationship with her cousin, and their estrangement begins her journey that takes her off-world and then to the heart of the Hegemonic city. Jerusha PalaThion is a female "blue", basically the Hegemonic law enforcement. She struggles, dealing with the discrimination dealt to her from the men of her department, as she tries to unravel whatever it is that Arienrhod is up to (and she's pretty sure she's up to something). She's probably my favorite character in the book (right after Arienrhod).

I've seen numerous comparisons to other big works of sci-fi (most notably Dune, and to be honest, I think there is some truth to some of the comparisons). And while this does use some major themes/trops, it's also refreshing with it's strong female component.

Vinge's prose is also fantastic, and her world building is absolutely complete. The scraps of science and the reasoning behind motives is interesting and fascinating. Is it the most original thing ever? Probably not, but it's easily one of the best books I've ever read. As soon as it's available on kindle, I'll own it. show less

Loosely based on a famous fairy tale, The Snow Queen is a story about good, evil, power, and love above all else. The planet Tiamat is defined by two cultures, which alternate power over centuries. When Tiamat is accessible by the black hole based FTL drive, it is part of the Hegemony, the Snow Queen ruling over Winter with technological tricks from the stars. For the century of Summer, when the stars of the planet orbit close on the black hole, Summer rules, a luddite culture that rejects technology. Tiamat is also the only source of the immortality drug the Water of Life, murderously extracted from the local mer, a seal-like species.

The cycle has endured for centuries, but the current Snow Queen, Arienrhod, a woman of tremendous power show more and evil, plans to break the cycle and uphold Winter. The first step of her plan is to clone herself, and have the clone raised as a member of the Summer culture. But then everything goes awry, as the clone, Moon, and her cousin and true love Sparks, refuse to fit neatly into the plan. Moon becomes a sybil; a semi-legendary breed of oracles, and winds up leaving the planet with idealistic tech-smugglers trying to help out Tiamat in their own way. Sparks falls into the orbit of Arienrhod and becomes her right hand, the masked hunter Starbuck. Most of the novel concerns the arc of degeneration around Arienrhod, her city of Carbuncle (an immense shell-like spiral constructed by the fallen Old Empire), and the moral degeneracy that is connected to the immortality drug. Meanwhile, Moon discovers the extent of her powers and returns to set things right.

Vinge is the first self-consciously feminist writer to win the Hugo for best novel, an opinion confirmed by the front and backwards material in this version. Ursula LeGuin is a great writer, but concerned more with Humanity than with women. Vonda McIntyre wrote an adolescent fantasy, and a bad one at that. I think Snow Queen is a female counterpart to Dune The similarities are clear: a chosen one with the power of prophecy; a harsh and primitive world valued for its immortality drug; themes of moral decay and personal salvation; along with inversions like water for sand, and lust instead of revenge as the prime driver for personal politics. One of the viewpoint characters, the interstellar cop Jerusha PalaThion, is a clear analog to the stark discrimination women faced in the late 1970s.

I was surprised by how much I liked this book, given that I'd never heard of Joan D. Vinge before. She had a checkered career, doing novelizations to make ends meet in the 90s, and then spending most of the 00s down with medical problems. The way that minor uses and abuses on human dignity add up to a complete lack of empathy and great evil in Arienrhod and her minions, is as good a picture of evil as any that I've read (comparable to Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone). Vinge is vividly imaginative and solid on the world-building. For example the FTL drive involves plunging into a black hole, so starships are disc-like to minimize tidal stresses, while the cultures of Tiamat and the Hegemony are brightly painted. She's an enthusiastic writer, and a great describer of place and character. If I have any strike against this book, it's that it's actually too quickly paced. I think the story could've been done better as two volumes or a trilogy, with a little more room to breath.

Not that my audience needs any reminders, but The Snow Queen is proof that great stories can be written by women, about women, for everybody. show less

A science fiction almost retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson story, except that the young woman who goes to rescue her friend from the Snow Queen, is a power in herself. And almost completely without demonstrated personality, as dull as many male SF protagonists who may say they love, or require, but whose feelings aren't sharable. It is Sparks weakness that are more real and the conflicts of the Blues that give the rather fractured story telling it's emotional load. And of course there is the stunning creation of Tiamat.

(Amy) When I was younger, and reading absolutely everything I could find (mostly in libraries whose SF sections seemed to be stocked mainly by donations rather than library purchases), I read a lot of what I suppose one would call vintage SF, and some not quite vintage but certainly not current. Lately, as I've discovered quite a few authors who are still writing, I have read almost nothing written before, say, 1985. Probably not much written before 1995. This was not a conscious decision, it just seemed to happen that way. Upon realizing this, I have been making some effort to intersperse some older books into my reading routine.

To that end, I picked up this book on one of my perusings of our bookcases. It's not so very old - 1980, show more according to the copyright date - but old enough to have been below my radar for the most part.

Arianrhod, the Snow Queen, is ruler of a world that produces an age-defying substance the rest of the galaxy wants very much, but which will soon swing close to the black hole that provides its access to the outside universe, as it does every 150 years, and the balance of power swings away from Winter and into Summer. Arianrhod has now ruled for 150 years and isn't willing to meekly give up her power - and her life - at the Time of Change, and so she has devised a Plan...

One thing that bugged me was the rather heavy-handed gender-power-imbalance thing, as apparently the outside galaxy thinks this female-ruler system of Tiamat is quaint at best. I can't tell if the author was trying to make a point about the inability of human society to be comfortable letting women have power ever, even thousands of years in the future, or if I'm overthinking it, and it's just a characteristic of the dominant society in the Hegemony. It was frequently jarring, though, whichever it was.

In any case, I certainly see why it won a Hugo. It is a brilliant book, and I am sad that the copy we have is falling apart so enthusiastically. Obviously, we shall have to replace it.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2008/09/the_snow_queen_joan_vin... )

(Alistair) And now, a lovely baroque piece of SF, one capable of entwining a pleasingly large number of plots, elements and issues, against a background of equally pleasing complexity. I see that quite a few people have compared it to Dune; I might be more inclined to compare it with Jack Vance than Frank Herbert, personally, but no matter.

In any case, five gold stars for worldbuilding. The world of Tiamat, a fallen world set against the background of a somewhat-less-fallen Hegemony set again against the background of the no-longer-extant galactic Empire is rendered in convincing and beautiful detail, and the effects of the collapse and rebuilding are shown well in the social issues of the book's present day (such as those Amy mentions in her review). The careful construction of the universe really shows through without being obtrusive. On that level, I like it very much.

The plot itself is driven, initially by the relationship between Tiamat and the Hegemony: both the intermittent connection between the world and the other worlds of the Hegemony, since the Hegemony has not yet rediscovered the ancient FTL drive and must rely on a black hole within its space to navigate, and Tiamat's system's orbit around said hole closes off access to it periodically even as it creates a 300-year cycle of "seasons"; and also that Tiamat produces a resource the Hegemony must have access to, an anagathic drug not found or producible elsewhere, which in turn drives the Hegemony to keep Tiamat primitive and dependent upon it...

And so, as the book opens, Arianrhod - the "Snow Queen" who rules Tiamat for half of the seasonal cycle, before dying and being replaced, plots to remain on the throne, and to find a way around the embargo on technology...

And It Is Good. As Amy said, one can see why this won a Hugo. I await the sequel coming to the top of my reading queue with great anticipation. Recommended.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2009/01/the_snow_queen_joan_d_vinge... ) show less

I always found the Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale [b:The Snow Queen|139987|The Snow Queen|Hans Christian Andersen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320401869s/139987.jpg|2535765] oddly disturbing, that business with mirror splinters in the eye creeped me out as a kid. This Hugo award winning book by Joan D. Vinge (Mrs. Vernor Vinge no less), takes the original tale and turns it up to 11. I find that female science fiction authors are frequently better at character development and are better prose stylists than their male counterparts, cases in point (off the top of my head) would be Ursula K. Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Anne Macaffrey and Mrs. Vinge here very much deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with show more them (but isn't). Certainly with this book she has created some emotionally complex and believable characters who she puts through the wringer and they come out better people for it (unlike in real life when I tend to shake my fist at the sky post-wringer sessions).

The hardest villains to write are the ones who are morally complex and commit heinous acts on the basis of some warped principles, like altruism gone wrong. The super wicked titular Machiavellian character never hesitate to corrupt, murder and destroy for in the name of planetary progress. She thinks nothing of killing half the populace yet she misses her younger days when she was just a happy care-free girl and instinctively fall for a boy who reminds her of her younger self. She now ranks among my all time favorite villains. Romance is a major aspect of the story but not the adolescent starry-eyed type that will leave twitards weak at the knees. Here it is portrayed as a vastly complicated human condition that create, destroy, corrupt and redeem with equal facility.

My only complaint is that the male characters are not as well developed as the ladies, especially the two "starbucks" characters who are despicable and deserve their eventual decaffeination (sorry). The one exception is a sympathetic policeman who goes on to have his own spin-off adventures in later books.

It is a terrible shame that The Snow Queen is out of print (as I write) while Stephenie Meyer's literary manures are in plentiful supply. The most recent book by Joan D. Vinge appears to be a [b:Cowboys and Aliens|10904100|Cowboys and Aliens|Joan D. Vinge|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1318919765s/10904100.jpg|15820209] novelization. What is the world coming to?? show less

My thoughts on this book are quite tangled.

On one hand I loved the sci-fi elements of this book. A world which is periodically reduced to a "primitive" state, controlled by the Hegemony for the purpose of harvesting it's most precious resource.

On the other is the drama surrounding the Winter Queen, her Summer clone and their joint love.

Honestly I would have enjoyed the book with far less of the latter and more of the former. The dramatical parts of the book really dragged for me. The whole redemption of Sparks thing was a joke and the treatment of Jerusha was unnecessary. Moon really frustrated me at times.

I would have like a lot more on the sibyls, the mers and the Old Empire. I think the book could have benefited more from those show more subjects and if it dropped the incest off a bit. I found that to be quite odd and a little disturbing. I would have preferred Moon stay with BZ and Sparks to get the punishment he deserved.

Overall though it wasn't a bad book but I won't be reading any more of the series. show less

It really irritates me that I can't remember why I sought out this book. I have made a concerted effort recently to find SF written by women, but still, some one or some article must have recommended this book in particular, and I don't remember what that was. It was a like a mosquito buzzing around my head the entire time I read this book.

But onto the book itself! Like Dune, the planet of our particular interest (in this case, Tiamat), is the only source of an amazing substance with powerful effects. Like in Dune, the rules of the known universe conspire to keep this planet subjugated in order to enjoy continued supply of said substance. And like in Dune, there is one character who seems uniquely predestined to rule this planet and show more lead it out of its subjugation. (Also, like in Dune, this doesn't really rely on exploiting the substance, but rather halting its production altogether.)

The Snow Queen is a highly ambitious book. Unfortunately, I didn't find Moon nearly as relatable as Paul. (Paul? Relatable? It seems strange to say such a thing, even in comparison.) Moon is foreign from top to bottom -- starting out as a Lady-worshiping, cousin-loving island girl, transformed into a sibyl for the Lady herself, then as she discovers what a sibyl truly is and finally learns that she is a clone of the Snow Queen, ruler of Tiamat, created in an attempt to retain power past the Change...

It was the minor characters and the fate of the planet itself that finally drew me in, until I was reading voraciously, turning each page with both increasing hunger and certainty that the ultimate fate I yearned to learn wouldn't be revealed until a later book. (Indeed! There are at least three more books in the series.) I fell in love with the mers, with Fate, with PalaThion, Miroe, BZ, Tor and her faithful Pollux. Some readers criticized that Snow Queen was too long, and maybe during the long, slow buildup I would have agreed. But by the end I wanted more, more more. Chapters, entire books devoted to these fascinating support characters! And more about Moon's plotting for Summer! I guess this all means I'm on the hook for at least the next book in the series... show less