The Snow Queen

Tiamat orbits a black hole, and every hundred and fifty years the offworlders who exploit it must withdraw as the interstellar gate closes. Power on the planet alternates with that cycle: the technologically indulged Winters, who trade with the offworlders, and the Summers, who reject their machines and follow the Sea Mother. The Change is coming, and Arienrhod, Snow Queen and ruler of Winter, has no intention of surrendering her throne or her extended life, which is sustained by the water of life distilled from the slaughtered mers of Tiamat's oceans. Her plan involves a clone raised in ignorance among the Summer islands. That girl, Moon Dawntreader Summer, wants nothing but to become a sibyl and to keep the boy she loves, and when circumstance separates them she is carried offworld into knowledge she was never meant to have. Vinge builds her novel on the bones of Andersen's fairy tale and fills it with anthropology, colonial economics and the machinery of a fallen empire. It is lush, sorrowful and unusually clear-eyed about extraction: about what the wealthy will consume, and who is expected to supply it.