Book Review: The Snow Queen

Joan D. Vinge

1980

Awards: Hugo, Locus
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.