Joan D. Vinge is an American science-fiction writer, born in Baltimore in 1948, best known for the Hugo Award-winning novel The Snow Queen.
Trained as an anthropologist, she brought a social scientist's eye for cultures and their collisions to her fiction. Her major work, the Snow Queen Cycle, reimagines Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale on the ocean world of Tiamat, where two rival clans trade rule of the planet as its climate turns; the first volume, The Snow Queen, won both the Hugo and Locus awards for best novel, and she continued the saga across World's End, The Summer Queen and Tangled Up in Blue.
She is also loved for the Cat books - Psion, Catspaw and Dreamfall - following a half-alien telepath surviving at the margins of a stratified future, and she wrote acclaimed novelisations of films from Return of the Jedi to Ladyhawke and Willow. An earlier story, 'Eyes of Amber', also won her a Hugo.
A serious car accident in 2002 halted her writing for years; she returned to publishing in the time that followed. Her fiction is marked throughout by rich world-building and a deep humanity.
