Vinge, Joan D. - The Snow Queen

[oyceter]

The Snow Queen is a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snow Queen" (obviously), with a great deal of other plot elements and SFnal trappings laid on top of it. The 150 Winter on Tiamat is ending, and with it, the reign of the Winter Queen Arienrhod. Arienrhod has kept herself alive and in power through all of Winter with her control over the mers, sea creatures on the planet whose blood imparts an elixir of immortality. But to keep the upcoming Summer from meaning the end of her life and her rule, she has created a clone, Moon, to be raised among the Summers, un-tech-savvy natives of the world.

Eh. I feel a bit bad, but I'm not quite sure why this is lauded as a modern SF classic. The world-building was solid, and I liked how everything tied together, I very much liked how Vinge followed the plot of the original Snow Queen story without making anything seem predictable, but there was some spark missing for me.

I think a lot of it might be because I disliked Moon. I get that she is good and holy and everything that's the opposite of the depraved and immoral Arienrhod, but I am so sick of this good/evil dichotomy, especially for women, and I am especially sick of it when there's a love triangle involved. I hate love triangles. Well, I hate love triangles when two people are in competition and there's rivalry involved, and boy is there rivalry here. And I was so incredibly sick of how everyone fell over backwards to help Moon because of her pure and shining goodness. Also, I'm really bored of depraved court stories. Either that, or, you know, the Snow Queen's court only seemed mildly depraved to me. To be fair, I read this after Holly Black and George R. R. Martin, both of whom have far, far more depraved courts than this. Vinge just never quite captured the feeling of a declining civilization and fin de siecle culture well enough for me.

Also, I am sick of good and beautiful sea creatures whose only purpose in life is for wisdom and nobility and truth and all that. Heck, don't these things prey on anything? What, do they only eat harmless shrimp or somesuch? They're like unicorns! Swimming unicorns! I mean... they are slaughtered by people so that their pure and innocent blood can grant immortality. Sure, there is a SF reason behind it, but the mythos remains the same.

I feel rather unfair being annoyed with the book. As far as I know, these things are only so common in SF because of Vinge's book. Well, except maybe the good/evil woman thing. For once, I'd like to see the female priestess equivalent from a relatively primitive culture be not holier and purer than the aging queen of a court, versed in manners and subtlety. Just once. Please?

Anyhow, it was a fast read, and I tore through it, which is saying something, but it's also left something of a bad taste in my mouth, largely because by the end of the book, I was extremely fond of Arienrhod, out of sheer orneriness, and rolling my eyes at Moon. I do this often when I feel like there's an authorial hand trying to make me like one character and dislike the other.

Oh wait. I had one more thing to be annoyed about. Why in the world is the Twu Wuv of Moon and Sparks so incredibly Twu and Good? They spend little time together in the book that I have no idea why each keeps searching for the other and why they feel so strongly toward each other. All I get at the beginning is this bitty scene, except that bitty scene already has Moon becoming a sibyll and separating from Sparks. They keep mooning after each other, but I got no sense at all that they really loved each other. I felt more like they did so as a plot point, or because they were so used to the idea of being in love with each other that they kept being in love with the idea, rather than the actual person. I wish so much that Vinge had done something more with the relationship rather than take it down the standard path, especially after it looked like she was going to do something.

But of course, Our Heroine and Our Hero must only love each other. Blech. I scrub the taste of bad romances out of my mouth (romances being the subplots or plots of books, not the actual genre). I detest romances that only serve to move the plot along, especially if it's One True Love.

Hrm, actually, the more I think about it, the more annoyed with the book I get!

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Good review. I haven't read it yet, but was planning to, not very enthusiastically. I love Vernor Vinge, but Joan just doesn't work for me, for many of the reasons you mention. The goody-goodness is overwhelming, too often.

[oyceter]

This is actually the first Vinge I've read! But yeah, if the Moon character type is fairly prevalent in her works, I'll probably end up avoiding them, despite good world-building.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This may not seem a reasonable plan of action if you didn't like The Snow Queen per se, but the sequels, World's End and The Summer Queen, considerably complicate (understatement much?) the Twu Wuv Happy Every After Theme of Moon and Sparks. (But I liked The Snow Queen, which makes a difference.)

[oyceter]

Hrm, complication is good! I will see how I feel about it too ;). I think it just never really hit me quite as much as I felt it should have.

[treetelling.livejournal.com]

As oursin already pointed out, the sequels do become much less predictable. _World's End_, in particular, I like for its deconstruction of the hero (both myth and person, if you ask me.) I haven't reread _Snow Queen_ very much, although I've gone back to _World's End_ and _Summer Queen_ (tons of complicated relationships in that one) several times. _Tangled Up in Blue_, an additional sequel, I thought was a mite repetetive. However, if you disliked the first one that much, it certainly makes sense to avoid the others.

[oyceter]

Hum, yeah, the world didn't really catch me quite as much as I thought it would have. I'm really not sure what it was....

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Were the Twu Wuvers cousins? I remember kinking on the incest vibe at the introduction, but I don't actually remember whether they were in fact blood related at all.

I read the book last year and loved it, in large part I think because it felt so true to the tone/theme/whatever of the HCA story.

I don't feel like I have solid responses to your criticisms of the book, though. It may well be that I don't read a whole lot of stuff in its genre(s) so I'm less pinged by the repetition of cliches.

I remember including the book in my "Brave New Worlds" course midterm paper ("Dystopian Women: Sex, Death, and Social Cues?") but I'd have to reread it to recall what claims I actually made about Arienrhod et al. I can send it to you if you want, though I don't know how many of the works discussed you've actually read.

[oyceter]

Yup, cousin-cest!

Ooo I'd like to read your paper ^_^. What works do you discuss in it?

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

Mostly the dystopian novels we had read for class. When I was looking at the possible paper topics, my friend Emma mentioned Vinge's Snow Queen (in part because she knows my love for fairytales) so I got a library copy and ended up being able to include it in my paper.

Bibliography
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classic, 1981.
Vinge, Joan D. The Snow Queen. New York: Popular Library, 1989.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Avon Books, 1987.

I'd be happy to e-mail you the paper, though I make no claims as to its greatness.

[oyceter]

Sounds good! My email is oyceter at livejournal dot com.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Everyone I know thought the book was meh. (I haven't read it.)

Andre Norton's Sorceress of the Witch World has a nicely complicated depiction of the priestess of a primitive nomadic society. I like the book a lot, though the ending dissolves in hallucinatory incoherence (a problem with a lot of sf, alas.)

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I adored it, although it is not without its flaws (some detailed above). I thought World's End was interesting, Tangled up in Blue a fun stand-alone romp with nods to the existing books, and The Summer Queen is considerably more complex, but suffers correspondingly from diffused focus and a curious lack of tension.

[oyceter]

Hrm, interesting! I wonder if I had expectations that were too high, thanks to the whole "modern classic" blurb and whatnot.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I loved it. I did read it when I was sixteen (with the Leo and Diane Dillon cover -- my god, that book has been fortunate in covers), and so I took a lot of things at face value, and wasn't particularly critical about the goodness of Moon or the evilness of Arianrhod. I really wanted Moon to end up with BZ, though. I think.

I liked various revelations about immortality and technology at the end, which *were* revelations to me, and I loved the masks and the epic-ness of the plotlines.

When I read World's End, I was uncomfortably semi-aware that the same things that made me dislike it also made it a much better book. I think I'd probably like it better now, although I also recall it as moving very slowly.

The Summer Queen had a lot of the tone and style I liked in the first book, but didn't feel like it was adding anything new.

[oyceter]

I feel rather bad raining on everyone's parade!

I totally wanted Moon to end up with BZ as well (too many romance books or something make me really hate the One True Love thing), and just when it looked like Vinge would do the slightly more subversive thing, Moon still went with Sparks.

[seajules]

I remember not being terribly bothered by Moon when I read the book because I took her goodness to be a sign of her clonehood. I also took people's reactions to her to be less about her goodness and more about Arienrhod's face paired with even shallow decency. Of course, this was years ago when my critical faculties were less well developed, so I might have been giving the author more credit than was warranted.

I do remember being bored and annoyed to death by the romantic pining, a plot point that has always irritated me in any story. Didn't help that I couldn't see what either Arienrhod or Moon saw in Sparks. I mean, I got that he was a challenge for Arienrhod, and part of the point was taking him away from Moon, but I didn't get why he held any of her attention beyond those goals. Moon's love of him worked a little better for me in that I took it to be a displacement of her longing for home. She thought she loved and wanted him, but really what she wanted was to return to her childhood with him. Again, though, it's entirely possible I was ascribing these motivations to her and the author actually intended that she loved Sparks and that's all there is to it.

I liked World's End, but not enough to ever get around to reading The Summer Queen. A few years had passed by then, and the memory of both Sparks and Moon got on my nerves. I liked Arienrhod better. She was more complex, more ambiguous, and more human.

[oyceter]

I sort of got that from Moon, but it was BZ's whole speech about how Moon just personified goodness and how he couldn't possibly see her doing anything bad (granted, he was in love with her) that got to me, since that seemed to be the attitude of almost all the characters, stated or not.

I liked Arienrhod much better too! And so I got irked that of course she would never end up with The Guy, etc.

[seajules]

See, I think even at the time I wrote off BZ's opinion of Moon because I knew people infatuated with other people had really warped views of them. As for everyone else, I really did think they might have been overreacting a bit because of what they'd dealt with in Arienrhod, so again their views were warped.

Really, I was more irked that Arienrhod wanted the guy than that she wouldn't end up with him. She seemed so smart otherwise, I did not get why she was so enamoured of him.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, having read this book several years ago and in Russian, I had pretty much the same reaction, less detailed - not quite throwing in the wall, but "meh"

The recs for the sequels above seem intersting, but not enough to inspre me to return to this story.

As the retellings go it also didn't impress me, but I liked the cover art.

[oyceter]

Yeah... I liked the SFnal stuff on top of the Snow Queen story, but then, it took away some of the mythicness imho and never quite resonated with me. But yeah, the cover art is gorgeous!

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Well, I ADORED this book when I first read it, but (1) I was in high school, and (2) I had somehow -- and I don't quite understand how this happened -- never actually read the HCA Snow Queen, so the whole thing felt fresh and new to me.

But thinking back (I haven't reread it in years), I think there are still things I'd like about it: I'm a sucker for the whole getting sucked into depravity and hating yourself for liking it thing -- one of my favorite varieties of Man Pain. Also, is it really a love triangle if the two women are (genetically and thematically) the same person? They both end up defining themselves in opposition to each other, so Sparks doesn't end up with a real, rounded person no matter who he picks, and that always broke my heart. He only gets half a woman -- like a world that only gets one season.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I liked the book a lot too, but read it ages ago. I remember liking the complexity of the political intrigue.

[oyceter]

I think I read too much inspired by TSQ or somesuch, because even the political intrigue didn't interest me, and usually I adore that type of stuff =(. It's weird... for some reason that I can't pinpoint, it didn't feel intrigue-y enough! I think it's because I've read George R. R. Martin before reading this, and it's hard to compare.

[oyceter]

I still saw it as a love triangle, despite the clone thing, just because the women ended up seeing each other as rivals, despite Arienrhod's insistence that she'd be ok sharing Sparks. Moon definitely seemed to see Arienrhod as a rival, and it's that rivalry (particularly between women) that is a major irrational button pusher for me. Drives me nuts.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Did you read Psion? That is the ultimate in Vinge's Man-Pain works for me. I always adored Cat.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Okay, sorry for replying to this late (and really sorry if it feels like I'm LJ-stalking you- I have a free evening and like digging around in LJs, is all), but thanks. Somehow, I had this book recced to me through a thread on a forum somewhere that was about cover art. So I picked it up at a Half Price somewhere and took the time to see if it would be any good.

I was so bored. I don't remember if I stopped reading after Moon became/was becoming speshul on purpose, but I do remember how bloody obvious it was that she and Spark would not both be chosen to be speshul after that nonsense about them swearing not to progress without each other. I dropped the book and picked up Melusine instead, and despite how I still feel about that book (I loved and hated parts of it and its sequel), I definitely don't regret not buying The Snow Queen.

[oyceter]

Hey, comments are fun!

Heee, I completely agree about Moon and Spark's spehsulness of DOOM. *sigh*

Melusine! Such mixed feelings! Oh Felix, why are you such a prat?

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Melusine! Such mixed feelings! Oh Felix, why are you such a prat?

Oh, my GOD, I've found someone who at least partially agrees with me! *throttles Felix* Seriously, I couldn't bear to linger on the last fifth or so of the sequel. My mantra was literally, "Find out what happens and DROP THIS SHIT", I swear. Have you read the sequel? If so, you'll probably be able to guess what moment threw me off there. Not that I wasn't already considerably angry for Mildmay, but hey, what do I know. I'm all for brotherhood against all odds and everything (else, why the heck am I still following The Donnelly Brothers online?), but I really really wanted to hit Mildmay upside the head, shake him and tell him NO MATTER HOW YOU FIDDLE WITH THINGS HERE, IT WILL END BADLY YOU STUPID MAN. YOUR BROTHER IS AN ASSHOLE, LOVABLE BUT FREAKING TOXIC! STAY AWAY, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STAY AWAY!

[/rant] As you might have guessed, I'm still a bit angry about how that book turned out. The worst thing wasn't even how pratty Felix was, I think; it was how much freaking rope the other characters would measure out, tie to a suitably high point, and politely request help in tying knots so that he'd hang them faster. As fascinating as Sarah Monette (truepenny, btw. Bizzarre, isn't it, that so many authors are on LJ now) managed to make Felix, I was well tired of his being a selfish, pompous jackass and stealing the show.

Of course, I'll probably be reading the next one anyway, just in case Mildmay ever wises up. If there was one thing I loved about both books, it was most likely him and his history and everything. *sighs*

[oyceter]

HEEEE! OMG, you must check out mistful's review; it is hilarious. Also, I like why she likes Felix -- because he keeps describing how gorgeous Mildmay is!