Give the little mermaid her prince, and her heart is never challenged to choose between her life and his. In The Snow Queen, a science fiction version of the fable, author Joan D. Vinge illuminates previously hidden corners of the saga. Anyone who adapts a classic fairy tale risks losing the heart of the story, but rather than lessening the impact, Vinge reveals nuances that add to Hans Christian Anderson's original.

On the surface, Vinge's story may be as far from a fairy tale as you can get; there's a mix of political intrigue, clones, spaceships and the age-old human quest for immortality. The novel is mainly set on Tiamat, a world proscribed by the Hegemony, an empire consisting of seven planets connected by wormholes near black holes in space. Tiamat is the source for the water of life, which grants eternal youth to those who can afford a regular supply. By suppressing Tiamat's technological development, the Hegemony neutralizes any political advantage Tiamat might gain in controlling the water's distribution. Arienrhod, the Winter clan queen of Tiamat, seeks to overthrow the Hegemony's oppression while simultaneously plotting to retain her throne against the imminent rule of the Summer clans, a traditional changeover dictated by the cycles of Tiamat's climate.

The plot is already complex, but Vinge weaves a dense story here, and Arienrhod's struggle to break Tiamat's technological ghettoization is but one layer of the plot. Another stratum follows Moon and Sparks, two teenagers of the Summer clan pledged to each other, who dream of living out their lives together as "sybils," oracles of the Sea Mother. Upon taking the sybil test, Moon passes but Sparks fails. Angry and resentful, he leaves Moon behind to travel to Carbuncle, the capital of Tiamat, where he soon becomes the Winter Queen's flute player. Upon the completion of her sybil training, Moon travels to Carbuncle to look for Sparks, at one point getting a ride from an off-world smuggler. During a stopover, a police raid forces Moon to flee off-planet with another smuggler, an old woman who brings proscribed technology to Tiamat. Although Moon manages to return to Tiamat only a few months later, the time dilation of space travel means that five years have passed on the planet.

Sparks is devastated when he learns that Moon has left, as any Tiamatan who leaves the planet is forbidden to return. His heartbreak leads Sparks to succumb to Arienrhod's seductions, and he becomes her lover. Home at last, Moon plans to resume her journey to Carbuncle but is kidnapped by a band of Winter technology thieves, one of whom wants Moon for a personal zoo, which includes both native and offworld animals.

And this is only the first half of the novel. I haven't even mentioned yet how the water of life is derived from the blood of the seal-like "mers," how a man named Starbuck slaughters the mers for their blood, how Moon discovers the identity of Sparks' off-worlder father, how Moon is Arienrhod's clone.... Needless to say, Joan D. Vinge continues to adapt the fairy tale in surprising and inventive ways to inform her own story, one that contains enough elements to easily fill 500-plus pages that could by no means be completely encompassed in a single review.

-- Alice Kubelsky

The Snow Queen is published by Warner Books and is available in paperback.

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