It is full of long expositional passages, clichés and unsophisticated dialogue, as well as cardboard cut out characters. While the world Vinge creates is unusual and interesting, the novel is laborious to read. If you manage to push past the unbelievably camp and OTT cover (or if you happened to pick up a cover with Whelan’s art), you will find a very dense piece of world building. However, this awful 1988 version is not the only awful cover version… Thankfully the most widely known image for the title is of Michael Whelan’s beautiful work, as well as his cover for the sequel, The Summer Queen. Seriously, I’m not kidding, it’s just plain awful. It had one of the worst covers of ALL TIME. When it arrived, I almost put it down on site. The book isn’t currently in print (at least not in the UK), but I picked up a copy for a whole £0.25 plus shipping online. Then I discovered it won the Hugo Award in 1981 and was nominated for the Nebula in the same year. More and more often I found it cropping up in articles I was reading on the site, often praised as a classic with a great villain. Before I became a regular reader of the Tor.com blog, I had never heard of D Vinge’s novel The Snow Queen.
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