Loosely based on a famous fairy tale, The Snow Queen is a story about good, evil, power, and love above all else. The planet Tiamat is defined by two cultures, which alternate power over centuries. When Tiamat is accessible by the black hole based FTL drive, it is part of the Hegemony, the Snow Queen ruling over Winter with technological tricks from the stars. For the century of Summer, when the stars of the planet orbit close on the black hole, Summer rules, a luddite culture that rejects technology. Tiamat is also the only source of the immortality drug the Water of Life, murderously extracted from the local mer, a seal-like species.

The cycle has endured for centuries, but the current Snow Queen, Arienrhod, a woman of tremendous power and evil, plans to break the cycle and uphold Winter. The first step of her plan is to clone herself, and have the clone raised as a member of the Summer culture. But then everything goes awry, as the clone, Moon, and her cousin and true love Sparks, refuse to fit neatly into the plan. Moon becomes a sybil; a semi-legendary breed of oracles, and winds up leaving the planet with idealistic tech-smugglers trying to help out Tiamat in their own way. Sparks falls into the orbit of Arienrhod and becomes her right hand, the masked hunter Starbuck. Most of the novel concerns the arc of degeneration around Arienrhod, her city of Carbuncle (an immense shell-like spiral constructed by the fallen Old Empire), and the moral degeneracy that is connected to the immortality drug. Meanwhile, Moon discovers the extent of her powers and returns to set things right.

Vinge is the first self-consciously feminist writer to win the Hugo for best novel, an opinion confirmed by the front and backwards material in this version. Ursula LeGuin is a great writer, but concerned more with Humanity than with women. Vonda McIntyre wrote an adolescent fantasy, and a bad one at that. I think Snow Queen is a female counterpart to Dune The similarities are clear: a chosen one with the power of prophecy; a harsh and primitive world valued for its immortality drug; themes of moral decay and personal salvation; along with inversions like water for sand, and lust instead of revenge as the prime driver for personal politics. One of the viewpoint characters, the interstellar cop Jerusha PalaThion, is a clear analog to the stark discrimination women faced in the late 1970s.

I was surprised by how much I liked this book, given that I'd never heard of Joan D. Vinge before. She had a checkered career, doing novelizations to make ends meet in the 90s, and then spending most of the 00s down with medical problems. The way that minor uses and abuses on human dignity add up to a complete lack of empathy and great evil in Arienrhod and her minions, is as good a picture of evil as any that I've read (comparable to Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone). Vinge is vividly imaginative and solid on the world-building. For example the FTL drive involves plunging into a black hole, so starships are disc-like to minimize tidal stresses, while the cultures of Tiamat and the Hegemony are brightly painted. She's an enthusiastic writer, and a great describer of place and character. If I have any strike against this book, it's that it's actually too quickly paced. I think the story could've been done better as two volumes or a trilogy, with a little more room to breath.

Not that my audience needs any reminders, but The Snow Queen is proof that great stories can be written by women, about women, for everybody.