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.

The Snow Queen is a fantastical elaboration of Hans Christian Andersen's folk tale of the same name. It records events on Tiamat, a world which exists in two states of being, Summer and Winter, alternating every century and a half. The Change is governed by a nearby revolving black hole, which provides a relativistically time-offset Stargate to the seven worlds of The Hegemony—the remote, political empire to which Tiamat is affiliated. The Stargate is closing. Summer approaches and the 150-year reign of Arienrhod, the...