1980
Awards:
Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Nominations: Nebula
Rating:
★ ★ – – –
After
having read several disappointing novels by Joan Vinge’s ex-husband Vernor, I have
to admit I was kind of dreading The Snow
Queen.
The
story takes place on the rustic, undeveloped planet Tiamat, where the seasons
are centuries long. The people of Tiamat are divided into two populations: “Summers,”
unsophisticated, backwards fisher-folk who live in the rural south, and “Winters,”
savvy cosmopolitans who live in the urban north. The Summers are deeply
religious and their most powerful deity is the goddess of the sea, who they
believe speaks to them through a few of their own people who have been called
to be “sibyls,” a sort of oracle. Their religion is dismissed as blind
superstition by the Winters and the offworlders alike.
As
the book opens, the long winter is just ending and summer is about to start. When
the seasons change from winter to summer, several things always happen. The
areas of the planet where the Summers live become too hot for human habitation
and they all migrate north to the cities to jostle for space with their northern
Winter brethren. The proximity of the sun makes conditions too unstable for the
nearby interstellar transport wormhole to stay open, so all the “offworlders” visiting
and working on Tiamat pack up and head home to their own planets, taking all
their advanced technology with them. And the Snow Queen, the ruler of the
planet during the wintertime and traditionally a native member of the Winter
population, is ritually thrown into the ocean to die and is replaced by the
Summer Queen.
This
winter, however, the people have been ruled by a particularly power-mad and
ruthless Snow Queen named Arienrhod. Arienrhod has never wanted to give up
power and die in the sea like she is supposed to. So a couple decades ago, she implanted
nine embryo clones of herself in nine unsuspecting Summer women visiting her
capital city for a festival, hoping that at least one clone turned out okay and
she could choose that girl to be the Summer Queen. This doesn’t really prevent
her from dying, of course, but at least she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing
that she will be the Summer Queen, too, in a way.
Of
the nine clones, the only one that survives to the end of winter is a girl
named Moon Dawntreader. Moon is a good-natured and unambitious girl raised among
fishermen on the seaside, who thinks she’ll be able to continue living indefinitely
in blissful happiness with her beloved cousin Sparks. Except
that one day, to everyone’s surprise, including Arienrhod's, Moon is called by the sibyls to become a
sibyl herself.
Sparks had wanted to be a sibyl, too, so when Moon is
chosen instead, he leaves in a jealous rage for the big city in the north. There he hooks up with Arienrhod and becomes a twisted, Darth-Vader-like, dark
side version of his former self.
The
rest of the book then follows Moon’s subsequent quest to reunite with Sparks and
fulfill her destiny as a sibyl, and Arienrhod’s attempt to find Moon and
achieve immortality, both of which affect the lives of a wide assortment of
secondary characters and build to a climactic showdown during the end-of-winter
celebrations.
In
contrast to Vernor’s books, Joan Vinge’s Snow
Queen at least kept me generally interested in reading from one chapter to another. She
weaves her themes, characters, and technological inventions consistently and intelligently
throughout the book, giving them depth and background, so that when they are
used, you feel like they are coming to fruition (rather than popping them in for
the first time only when they are needed to save the story line).
I
also got a bit of a kick out of the matriarchal society Vinge created for
Tiamat. Although the foreign offworlders were prejudiced against women in any
kind of powerful position, the people of Tiamat were traditionally ruled by queens, rather
than kings, and prayed primarily to an all-powerful goddess of the sea.
The matriarchy only goes so far, though. Under the woman-centric overlay, the
actions of the two main female characters (and some of the secondary ones) were
determined largely by their pursuit of (or escape from) a man. Most of their
crushing agonies and triumphant successes revolved around whether they had
gotten the male object of their affections (or ire) to do what they wanted. In
particular, although Moon’s destiny does have something vaguely to do with bringing
better times to her people, at every key decision point she chose her course of
action by whether or not it got her closer to Sparks.
It
also didn’t take me long to get fed up with the book’s romantic fantasy style. There
is advanced technology available in the universe but it is withheld from the planet’s
native inhabitants. So, by necessity, they resort to rustic, labor-intensive
clothing, food, work, traditions, and religion straight out of the Dark Ages. People
do their hair up in various forms of braid, drink ale and eat honeycake, and work
as farmers and fisherman and oracles and itinerant healers. They tend to be
superstitious, and like to attend large community festivals, and are partial to
cries of agony and/or passion when roused in either of those ways.
Every
other noun has to be archaically capitalized: the Hunt, the Change, the
Transfer, the Street, the Festival, the Death, the Sea.
Otherwise
ordinary nouns become romanticized by sticking an adjective onto them:“The [ship] dropped through a
flattening arc, like a slingstone
skimming an infinite pond.” “I’ll stay here at Street’s-end until you come out of
there.” “How do you know what anybody did
before the firstships sailed down
out of the Great Storm?”
I’m
the first one to admit that fantasy can be really fun when it is done well. I
like to be carried away by it, unselfconscious of how silly the language and
costumes and monsters might be to the uninitiated. But it can be giggle-making
if not handled right. And I’m afraid The
Snow Queen qualifies a little too often for the latter.
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