This delicious book [The Snow Queen] is a futuristic translation of the girl-rescues-boy fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen: the love story of Moon and Sparks….

This complicated, lyrical, anti-colonialist novel works as first-rate adventure, but its greatest achievement is the creation of a literal world of characters: human, robot, amphibian, male and female; from castes, tribes, and political systems across a galaxy. Not since I read the Oz books 25 years ago have I been so drawn into a writer's total reality.

Lindsy Van Gelder, in a review of "The Snow Queen," in Ms., Vol. IX, No. 1, July, 1980, p. 29.