Unlike the technology-obsessed Winters, the Summers are a more primitive and superstitious people who live from fishing, consider mers to be sacred and worship a sea-goddess called The Lady. Several years later, on an island in the Summer areas of the planet, a young woman called Moon leaves home with her beloved cousin Sparks. She orders the doctor to insert an illegal clone implant into the unconscious woman. The planet’s ruthless Winter queen, Arienrhod, sneaks into the room with a reluctant off-world doctor she has bribed into helping her. During the celebrations, a drunken couple fall asleep in a room in the city’s palace. In the planet’s capital city of Carbuncle, a festival is in full swing to celebrate a visit by the Hegemony’s Prime Minister. When it is open, the Winters are in charge and off-world technology is temporarily available to the planet in exchange for the “water of life” – an immortality serum derived from the blood of sea-creatures called mers. The planet is split into two tribes – Summers and Winters – who rule depending on whether the wormhole is open or shut. Although Tiamat is a member of a powerful interplanetary alliance called the Hegemony, it is only accesible to the rest of the Hegemony via a wormhole that opens and closes in 150 year cycles. A masterpiece of world-building.This is the 1988 Orbit (UK) paperback edition of “The Snow Queen” that I read. The breadth and richness of invite comparison with Frank Herbert’s Dune and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. “Vinge weaves a complex web of tangled love affairs, secret cabals, political intrigue, and high adventure centering around a unique woman and her visionary gift. Now, as the end of Winter’s regime approaches, the Snow Queen conspires to keep the Summer Queen from reclaiming the throne.īut beneath the planet’s surface lies the empire’s greatest secret: an enormous forgotten technology that may control the fate of worlds for those who can find it and unlock its secrets…

When the gateway is closed, Summer presides over Tiamat in its isolation.

Winter reigns when the wormhole between the planet and the Hegemony, the remnants of an interstellar empire, is open.

Vinge is a millennia-spanning far future saga.Įvery 150 years, the Winter and Summer clans alternate ruling the world of Tiamat. A modern science fiction classic, the Hugo Award-winning Snow Queen series from Joan D.

The snow queen by joan d vinge