THE SNOW QUEEN

by Joan Vinge ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 1980

Vinge has produced a clever space-opera transmogrification of the Andersen fairy-tale, down to the gate of winds and the Robber Maiden. Would that were all she'd done. The twin suns of the planet Tiamat (Andersen is liberally interspersed with more portentous allusions) orbit a black hole in such a manner that large reaches of the planet become uninhabitably hot for 150-year ""Summers"" during which the ships of the arrogant interstellar Hegemony cannot be brought through the black hole from other regions. In Winter Tiamat is a Hedge way-station, supposedly ruled by a native Winter Queen but in fact run by Hedge bureaucrats and Hedge criminals from the Winter starport-city of Carbuncle. In Summer Hedge personnel are pulled out and all technological devices are inactivated; the planet is left to slide into barbarism as a Summer Queen is chosen from the backward fisherfolk of the southern archipelagoes, who migrate northward to overrun the lands of the hated Winters. Arien-rhod, the reigning Winter Queen, has schemed to prevent the usual Summer relapse by preparing a clone of herself to be educated for the role of Summer Queen. But the girl, ignorant of her royal identity, unaccountably proves to be one of the ""sibyls"" (actually human computer-terminals) who constitute a link (never understood) with an ancient technology greater than that of the Hegemony. This plot, mazy enough in itself, is overlaid with enough arbitrary ambitions to sink a battleship. Vinge has simply chosen to work from too many sf premises at once, none worked out with real rigor. The writing is no more than adequate, the big moments are invariably bathetic, and one keeps having a sense of good ideas naively fussed to death.

Pub Date: April 3, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION