The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen is a science fiction novel by the American writer Joan D. Vinge, published in 1980. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1981 and was nominated for the Nebula, and it takes its title and its central situation from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The novel is set on Tiamat, an ocean planet whose suns orbit a black hole. That arrangement gives the world its one connection to the rest of the galaxy: a wormhole, called the Black Gate, which carries travellers between Tiamat and the Hegemony, the remnant of an older empire, and which closes for more than a century at a time. Anyone from Tiamat who leaves while it is open is permanently exiled.

The people of the planet are divided into two clans, the Winters and the Summers, whose long disagreement the closing of the gate has made urgent, while the Hegemony has its own interest in how the succession is settled. Vinge drew on Robert Graves's study of mythology, The White Goddess, as well as on Andersen's story.