And the only thing we know about Sparks is that his father was an “off-worlder” and that motivates him to make his way to the big city where “summers” like him are considered bigger rubes than rural Ohioans in downtown Manhattan–they are “superstitious fish-farmers reeking of seaweed and tradition.” But then they turn out to be the main characters? And the only thing we know about Moon is that she’s a sibyl and even though Sparks leaves her in their hometown because he can’t be a sibyl too, her driving motivation is to be with him again. I thought they were going to be the kind of background characters who show what a world is like before we meet the main characters on the big stage.
Jeanne: No, it is not callous because we do not know them. I can’t describe to you how little I cared about them ever finding each other again. In despair, Sparks sets out to make his fortune in the city, and what with one thing and another, they are separated. She and her cousin Sparks (yes) both plan to be sibyls when they grow up. The current Winter Queen, Arienrhod, has come up with a scheme to prolong her reign: She impregnates a bunch of unconscious Summer women with cloned versions of herself, in the hopes that one of the clones will grow up and become the Summer Queen.įast forward the number of years it takes for a clone to grow up, and our hero is a girl called Moon. During the reign of the Winter Queen, the fancy-fancy technology planets have access to Tiamat via a wormhole, and during the reign of the Summers: No wormhole, no planet visitors, no trade in fancy tech. So the premise of this book is that this planet called Tiamat is ruled alternately by a queen from the Winters and the Summers, and every 150 years they swap out who rules. Has Joan Vinge thought about writing this same book but only two hundred and sixty-five pages long? How about that? Jenny: The thesis of my position paper is that this was too many pages to be. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long. Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). It’s a buddy read! My lovely pal Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, suggested recently that we do a buddy read, so I proposed one of the books that has languished for ages and ages on my TBR list: Joan Vinge’s classic SF novel The Snow Queen, which was published in 1980 and won a Hugo Award.
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