"To my mind science fiction has tremendous potential for being great literature, simply because you can do anything," Joan D. Vinge told Charles Platt in Dream Makers Volume II. "You can set up parameters which are totally unfamiliar. You can put charact...

Byline: MARY GREENE Edward VII's daughter Maud founded Norway's Royal dynasty. But did the King's doctor father her son using early fertility treatment? MARY GREENE reports She was the Queen's great-aunt Maud, the youngest daughter of King Edward VII, and her...

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But she wore the nomad's tunic she had brought back with her from Persiponë's, the only clothing she owned, its gaudy color as alien as she suddenly felt herself, among the people who should have been her own.

These lines from the "footrace" scene in Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen clearly express the psychological alienation of Dawn Moontreader Summer, the novel's heroine. Though she stands in a crowd of people from her own clan, she f...

[With The Snow Queen we] are in the presence … of a successor to [Frank Herbert's] Dune and [Ursula Le Guin's] The Left Hand of Darkness. However, comparisons are odious…. Because perhaps it ought to be said … that The Snow Queen is the quintessence of a certain kind of science fiction, a journey as far into the heartlands of the genre as it is possible to go without starting to come back. The publishers call this "worldcraft," and it is a form of novel that ...

Science, religion, magic, moral philosophy, anthropology, and indeed almost all the arts and sciences intermingle most deliciously in Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen…. The author describes herself as "an anthropologist of the future," by which she means alternate universes, and her work certainly contains strong echoes of Margaret Mead, Sir James Fraser and innumerable other strains of scientific, social and literary thought.