Book Review: The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

The Snow Queen
-Author: Joan D. Vinge
-Publishing Date: 1980
-Setting Genre: Science Fiction // Post-post-apocalyptic
-Narrative Genre: Ensemble Cast, Rebellion, Political Jockeying,
-Themes: Enforced Intellectual/Technological Stagnation, Conflicted Lawful Good, Woman as Seductress, Poaching,

Subjective Length: 3-5 days

Overall 6/10. Science fiction fans have a winner here, but the cross-genre appeal is limited. Also, the sheer scope of the book may be outside some readers' reading habits. The human element is strong here, and relatively few plot points rely on traditional sci-fi tropes. If a reader is familiar enough to accept time dilation, hovercrafts, aliens, and robots without much in the way of explanation, they will be brought into a very human story of betrayal, political players, and love. Two minor points stuck out as potential plot holes, but I'll get into those more in the synopsis. Needless to say, they didn't stop me from enjoying this book immensely.

Controversial Themes:
Sex: There's a lot of sex here, but it does stop just short of what could be called graphic. The plot includes seduction, romance, and sex workers, as well as edging a little close for comfort toward a potential rape scene.
Slavery: There are threats of off-world enslavement and a prolonged imprisonment scene in which two characters are called "pets" of a tribal woman. They are caged and treated as members of a multi-species menagerie. Despite the lack of their being used for labor, I believe this scene deserves inclusion in a rundown of examples of slavery in the text.
Poaching: While hunting sentient creatures for profit is shown as something villainous, it is still shown in, and shown in sometimes graphic detail.
Polytheism, Pantheism, and Humanism: At various times, characters swear by the "gods of the eight worlds", or by "the Sea". There are also people imbued with genetic access to a pre-war information network, called Sibyls, who are treated with a reverence leading into religious worship.

**SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD**

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge is a retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson tale in a science fiction setting. As fantasy-skinned science fiction, it is one of the better examples I've come across. The story takes place on the planet Tiamat, whose summer/winter cycle lasts centuries, creating a cycle of winter and summer dynasties. As the book opens, the world is preparing for the next change, when the Winter Queen will be sacrificed to the Sea and a Summer Queen will be named.

The story opens with a prologue, showing the Winter Queen working with an offworlder to create clones of herself and implant them as embryos into Summer women at a festival. This plan is sparsely described and creates a mystery of what is to come.

The plot proper opens on two young people: Moon Dawntreader Summer, and Sparks Dawntreader Summer. They encounter a sibyl, and decide to pursue the induction into the mysterious order of the sibyls, a group revered by the Summers and mystically able to answer any question asked of them.

As the plot progresses, their attempt to become sibyls ends disastrously, with Moon called to the order, and Sparks left behind. Because of a cultural belief that it is death to love a sibyl, they both realize that the love they shared can never truly be. Sparks goes into the capital city, the Carbuncle, to seek his fortune, and Moon goes off to train as a sibyl. It is at this point that the reader gets an insight into the Winter Queen's plan. Moon is the successful clone who was not overly genetically altered by the host body. In a desire to take Moon under her wing, the Winter Queen brings Sparks into her court, and sends Moon a message, falsely from Sparks, encouraging her to come to his aid.

En route, Moon falls in with techrunners, smuggling illegal tech onto Tiamat, and is brought off world with them. Using her sibyl abilities she is able to navigate the black hole that forms the portal to and from the worlds of the Hegemony. Due to time dilation, she loses years in what was, to her, a few months of travel.

Meanwhile, Sparks falls in love with the Queen, who Moon was cloned from, and challenges her lover, a man known to the public as only "The Starbuck". The Starbuck is an offworlder who consults with the Queen to give her advice on dealing with offworlders. When Sparks wins, he dons the mask to become the new Starbuck, and begins a decline into darkness as he compromises his morals to establish an underworld information net. Additionally, the duty falls to him to lead the hunt for the Mers, a race of amphibian creatures whose blood can grant continuous youth, if taken regularly. The Mers are revered as the Sea's children by the Summers of the world, and his hunting of them physically embodies his decline away from his old morals.

Offworld, Moon learns the truth of who she is: that sibyls are not magical beings, but the result of experimentation by the old empire to connect humanity to information networks that would aid the rebuilding of civilization. The Hegemony is trying to keep sibyls marginalized on Tiamat, by making the Winters regard them as hocus pocus, and making the Summers as technophobic as possible, to prevent the use of sibyls by Summer to their full potential. All of this is to keep Tiamat dependent on the Hegemony's technology, so that the rest of the Hegemony has leverage to obtain the blood of the Mers in trade. Moon is "proscribed": the term for a Tiamat native who has been off-world, and is banned by Hegemony law from returning to bring her people the knowledge she's found. For the rest of the Hegemony, the advancement of Tiamat is legally restrained.

Nevertheless, Moon returns to Tiamat under the radar. She is captured by natives, and makes connections with a captured Hegemony police officer. With his aid, they tear down the Queen's further plans to hold power through the coming change to Summer authority. Moon, using her sibyl abilities, is able to win the contest to become the Summer Queen. She rescues Sparks from being sacrificed with the Winter Queen and the two prepare to change their world for the better. With the change to summer, the alignment of the planet to its sun makes black hole travel impossible, earning the world a century's reprieve from Hegemony authority. As the story closes, Moon prepares to bring this world into it's own, using the sibyl's power and her found respect for technological advancement to bring their world into a stronger position when the Hegemony forces are able to return.

A side plot to this revolves around Jerusha PalaThion. PalaThion is in the position of being a police officer of the Hegemony, who continues to find more and more evidence of the fact that the Hegemony is exercising an unjustified tyranny over the people of Tiamat. She is torn between the knowledge that ignoring the law for her own desires is an opening for vigilantism and anarchy, and the knowledge that obeying the law is to be a party to tyranny: between an unjust law and the knowledge that lawlessness is worse. She is tormented by the fact that an officer of the law cannot strike a middle ground between totalitarianism and anarchy. This is a compelling internal conflict whenever it is used, and Vinge's use of it is masterful.

Two things stood out as potential black marks against the story. They might be plot holes, they might be explainable but unexplained pieces of the world, or they might even be something explained so briefly that I just missed it; that's entirely possible. First: for a government that works so hard to keep technology away from Tiamat, and that keeps Tiamat residents who leave their world from returning: the Hegemony is surprisingly okay with Hegemony citizens born on other worlds just deciding to stay on Tiamat. Seriously, all it takes is not bothering to get on the ship, and the Hegemony's fine with it. It's a little odd. The other is that after over a century of keeping a Starbuck to counsel her on off-world matters, the Winter Queen never learned that sibyls have real power, and are more than just a Summer superstition. For the level of devotion we see from the two Starbucks in the text, it seems unlikely that over all that time, none of them decided to share that information with their Queen and their love.

Those issues aside, this is a compelling world, and a masterful blending of genres. If you're a science fiction fan, this is one well worth reading.