The Snow Queen is a frustrating book. On the one hand, it has one of the most imaginative, well-thought-out settings in the genre--on par with Frank Herbert's Dune, or Brian Aldiss's Hothouse. On the other hand, just about everything else is subpar.

I'm a sucker for far-future, post-decay science fiction, and The Snow Queen is an exemplary specimen of that sub-genre. (Another prominent example is Gene Wolfe's far superior The Book of the New Sun.) The story of The Snow Queen takes place mostly on a planet called Tiamat, a remnant of a fallen Galactic Empire that now survives only as a loosely knit Hegemony. As a result of the Empire's downfall, the Hegemony lost its capacity for faster-than-light travel; the only way to cross the vast distances between stars is by way of a black hole known as the Black Gate, from which a variety of worlds are reachable. But the effects of time dilation still render travel difficult--two months aboard a ship may end up costing somebody five years at home.

Tiamat is unique in that it orbits a binary star system that itself circles around the Black Gate. Every few hundred years or so, Tiamat's orbit takes it so far away from the Black Gate that interstellar travel becomes impossible. During those times, Tiamat in effect becomes an isolated world, cut off from much of the technological production that sustains the rest of the Hegemony. It is also during this Change that the Summer People take over, as part of an institutionalized ritual. The Winters--the technologically minded population--continue to live on Tiamat, but they give up much of their technology for the more traditional minds of the Summers.

This is just a brief overview of Vinge's imaginative creation. There are also plenty of other cool elements: brief but tantalizing hints of the Old Empire, the sibyls (an awesome idea), a feeling of age unmitigated by novel technologies. The atmosphere of the Winter Palace is also great, and the concept of Starbuck is interesting, to say the least. I can't even imagine the effort that went into crafting the universe in which the story takes place. Unfortunately, I doubt that as much effort went into the rest of the book.

The plot is the worst part of the book. The narrative of The Snow Queen is loosely held together by a sequence of seemingly random events; I'm thinking in particular of certain revelations about the sibyls, other revelations about the mers, the discovery of Sparks's father, and others. When significant and non-random events occur, they often occur off-screen (so to speak): especially flagrant in this respect is the conclusion of Airenrod's storyline. Finally, the central love story of the book is pretty strained. Vinge doesn't stint on having Moon and Sparks declare their love for each other, but it's never established sufficiently to make the subsequent knocks to their relationships seem plausible.

The characters are also done less well than I would have wanted. Almost nobody is pushed to truly interesting extremes; Airenrod in particular isn't as interesting as she should have been, and to a lesser extent Sparks, Moon, Jerusha, and Ngenet are all too bland for the rich world that they inhabit. The one exception that I found was BZ, who goes through a lot and who is turned upside-down as a result. I think Vinge suffered from the usual author's reluctance to make characters die; as callous as it may sound, a few deaths here and there would have enriched the story considerably.

The Snow Queen is tantalizingly close to greatness but ultimately falls short.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu